IBM users take on integration

IT executives discuss pros, cons of committing to business application integration.

NEW YORK - When faced three years ago with a $100 million forklift upgrade of his infrastructure, Mike Sutten realized he needed to find another way to integrate data and business processes across 25 floating business units - his company's cruise ships.

Sutten, vice president of IT development at Royal Caribbean and Celebrity Cruises, said he needed to build a system that would let 25 cruise ships connected with an existing satellite-based WAN share information and support a variety of applications - in hopes of garnering more revenue. When he learned that about $33 million of that $100 million project price would go toward developing interfaces that would integrate the ship's myriad applications, Sutten decided to look for a better way.

"The violent transformation we originally had in mind was just not feasible," he said.

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NEW YORK - When faced three years ago with a $100 million forklift upgrade of his infrastructure, Mike Sutten realized he needed to find another way to integrate data and business processes across 25 floating business units - his company's cruise ships.

Sutten, vice president of IT development at Royal Caribbean and Celebrity Cruises, said he needed to build a system that would let 25 cruise ships connected with an existing satellite-based WAN share information and support a variety of applications - in hopes of garnering more revenue. When he learned that about $33 million of that $100 million project price would go toward developing interfaces that would integrate the ship's myriad applications, Sutten decided to look for a better way.

"The violent transformation we originally had in mind was just not feasible," he said.

Sutten recently spoke at IBM's Integration Day event, a gathering of IBM partners, executives, customers and press, to talk about application-integration issues. IBM also used the forum to announce new application adapters and security features for its WebSphere product line.

In Sutten's case, his company picked IBM WebSphere Business Integration Server to develop standard processes, integrate applications and build interfaces between the company's own applications and those of suppliers and partners. WebSphere Business Integration Server software sits between applications and lets them communicate with each other, without requiring customers to write specific interfaces for each application. IBM also develops adapters specific to popular applications, such as SAP and Siebel Systems.

The goal of Royal Caribbean's five- to seven-year plan is to develop a platform to which applications can connect and share data - which Sutten says is a step toward Web services for his organization.

Sutten and his team have built an interface to his dining room management application. He plans to build an integration interface for the food and beverage applications, and the cruise lines accounting and supply-chain systems - all of which come from different vendors.

Click to see: Cruise control

Ideally, Sutten says, he would like to see suppliers and partners open up their applications via APIs to integrate with Royal Caribbean to enable more efficient credit card processing. The new system would charge guests fewer times and reuse the guest data across applications, rather than processing it in multiple instances.

Dan Vaught, manager of enterprise architecture and integration at Safelite Glass, spoke of how he needed to integrate data stored mostly on mainframes with distributed server systems, and partner and supplier applications.

By using WebSphere Business Integration Server, Safelite will move to fewer, more common systems that will share a data model and let the company reuse application technology, rather than building new interfaces among applications from scratch. Vaught would not comment on the ROI he expects to achieve by deploying WebSphere, but he says using the software will let him build interfaces between applications in 20% of the time it normally would take.