Integration has been an area for specialists for years, since no standards exist across vendor products. This increases the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) to implement and maintain any integration solution. Even though integration is a necessary evil, CIOs and IT managers postpone decisions and actions, and sometimes go for ad-hoc or temporary solutions. Any such activity will complicate the already confused stove pipes and it is the need of the hour to have standardization. Here we are going to inspect the need of another standard for business integration, and also look into the details of what this standard is all about.

So we will cover the following in this chapter: