Coordinating COTS applications via a business event layer

Organizations tend to acquire COTS products on the basis of their functional domains, with each individual application covering a particular domain. Most integration architectures use message-oriented middleware (MOM) to automate the information flow between organizational units via message exchanges between COTS applications. This article explains how the abstraction level of these one-to-one message exchanges is too low to efficiently design an integration architecture. As an example, the creation of a purchase order affects order management, accounting, marketing, and many other functional domains. If all corresponding COTS applications are to process the order in a coordinated way, designing the interaction requires several one-to-one message exchanges and becomes quite intricate. Therefore, we propose BECO (business event-based coordination), an approach to integration architecture design that is based on the concept of business events. These act as higher-level units of coordination that enforce consistent processing in all participating applications.