Business change is a constant necessity as a result of increased competition, improved technology, and shifts in consumer patterns. As a result, an enterprise will reorganize, acquire other businesses, create new applications, and downsize others. Throughout these changes, companies are faced with the challenge of efficiently provisioning their resources in response to their business priorities. To deliver data where it is needed, when it is needed, requires sophisticated information integration technologies.
This chapter discusses the basic concepts of information integration and reviews historical approaches to information integration. We will compare data-level integration with process and application integration. This will provide some solid examples for real world decisions, when trying to understand information integration and how this relates to your business and technical initiatives.
This point is often the hard part of any heterogeneous situation. In the latter part of the chapter, you will understand how information integration is used in a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and the impact to a SOA-based system.