The iCIS Integration Concept

iCore Integration Suite facilitates the implementation of a genuine Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Typically, a Service Oriented Architecture is characterized by:

• Free-standing, independent components, combined by "loose coupling".
• Message (XML)-based instead of API-based.
• Physical location not important.

One major benefit of SOA is that the organization can reuse existing applications to a greater extent and therefore respond faster to change requests. These benefits are attributed to several critical elements of SOA:

• The services reflect logical business activities.
• New services can be created and added to existing services without affecting the existing service implementations.
• The services communicate by standard protocols providing broader interoperability.
• SOA encloses legacy systems (existing, often older applications) and processes so that the effectiveness of existing investments is preserved and may even be increased.
• Services have an interface and are message-oriented.
• SOA provides a platform for the technology and business departments in your company to meet common goals of the modern enterprise.

Sounds good, but how?

A sustainable, well-defined and comprehensive SOA is implemented incrementally – step by step, and sometimes with very small steps indeed. iCore Integration Suite enables you to:

• Configure loosely coupled information flows – iCIS allows you to design integration flows using a generic XML-format between the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and the application to be integrated. Loosely coupled components enable reuse.
• Expose composite services to the ESB – Designing composite services results in less complexity and less transaction traffic.
• Test with real-life conditions – iCore lets you set up a test environment, parallel to the production environment, where you can run new and modified integration flows (using real-life data) before going live in the production environment.
• Select the ESB that suits you – iCore Accelerators work with any ESB (IBM, BizTalk etc.). If have not already chosen one of the “giants”, our own cost-effective ESB – iCore Process Server will do the job. Should you change your mind at a later stage, it is easy to reconnect your Adapterflows to another ESB – at any time.