Overview: Siebel eBusiness Application Integration Volume l > Understanding Integration Paradigms >

About Designing Your Application Integration Project

There are three questions you must answer as part of the planning phase for any application integration project:

• How do I need to share my organization's data?
• Which access mechanism makes the most sense for my situation?
• Which preexisting connector best applies to my situation?

It is important to identify your need before designing the integration. Your design choice could be based on the following categories:

• Data Transformation. Data transformation between two systems is an important part of any integration project. You may want to implement this data transformation using the Siebel-provided data transformation functions or, if your organization has already standardized on a data transformation tool, you might choose to model the integration flow so that it uses the external tool for data transformation.
• Data Sharing. If you need to view data from an external source within your Siebel applications and do not need or want to replicate the data, you might use a specific set of objects and tools designed explicitly for this purpose. For example, you might want to view credit card transaction details from within Siebel applications while credit card transaction details are stored on a mainframe system.
• Real-Time or Batch. You should consider the type of integration you need: real-time or batch mode. For example, you might want to publish new opportunities created in Siebel applications to an external system as soon as the opportunities occur. Or you may want to exchange information in batch mode when you want to aggregate product catalog information from your suppliers.

Once you have designed your integration needs for each business process flow, you can apply the different components of Siebel eAI to implement a solution. Figure 8 illustrates the different types of applications that Siebel eBusiness Applications can integrate with.

Figure 8.  Siebel eBusiness Interfaces