IBM IS EMBARKING on a technical crusade to tie up key elements of its software and drive its users closer to the Holy Grail: business process integration and common access to structured and unstructured data.

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Big Blue's business process integration strategy will get a jolt next year when the company combines the functionality of its recently acquired CrossWorlds application integration engine with its WebSphere application server and Eclipse open-source tools project.

IBM is building "common components around the tools and server infrastructure around the J2EE [Java 2 Enterprise Edition] environment," said Ambuj Goyal, general manager at IBM's solutions and strategy group, in Somers, N.Y. "The next major play for middleware is in the business process integration space," he added.

The acquisition is expected to close in the first quarter 2002, and soon after, IBM will port the CrossWorlds run-time version to the J2EE specification. CrossWorlds will eventually share a common run time with WebSphere, according to IBM officials.

Existing CrossWorlds tools for building business objects and performing business process modeling -- or "process choreography" -- will be ported to the Eclipse project, Goyal said. Eclipse allows developers to mix and match Eclipse-compliant tools in a single environment

According to IBM officials, the company is already creating visual business process modeling with a "microflows" tool in its WebSphere Business Integrator version, due to ship in the first quarter next year. The tool allows developers to visually compose a business process workflow between software systems.

At the data level, IBM is hatching Xperanto, a native XML database that is currently in development at IBM's research labs and will function as a subset of the company's DB2 Universal Database, due in the fourth quarter of 2002. Xperanto will act as a dedicated server for information integration and will be packaged as a stand-alone server, as part of DB2 or WebSphere. By using XML and relying on XQL (XML Query Language), Xperanto will be a critical piece of IBM's long-term vision to marry structured and unstructured data.

"We have a new class of software that really is about information integration," said Janet Perna, general manager at IBM's data management solutions group. Included in Xperanto will be IBM's DB2 Relational Connect, data-mining technology, and EIP (Enterprise Information Portal).

IBM is also stepping up a three-phase initiative to set new Web services standards through the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). IBM executives believe such a concerted effort to establish Web services standards is necessary to crystallize the Web services vision to integrate applications, information, and business processes.

"We needed to get the acceptance of SOAP [Simple Object Access Protocol] and WSDL [Web Services Description Language], these so-called Phase 1 Web services standards. Unless you have the lower-level plumbing, you can't do upper-level [functionality]," said Bob Sutor, director of IBM's e-business standards strategy.

Phase 2 technologies, which are expected to be standardized by the end of the second quarter of 2002, comprise security, reliability, and authorization on a more granular level. Phase 3 technologies, which will overlap with the end of Phase 2 and are currently labeled "enterprise Web services capabilities," will address workflow, transactions, systems management, and provisioning.

IBM is taking a slightly different tack in its integration strategy than are its rivals. Microsoft is betting its strategy on BizTalk Server. The tool handles application and information integration, and a technology in BizTalk Server called Orchestration does business process integration.

Oracle's philosophy is to include all the integration layers in its application server. "You're not going to have niche technologies for integration. We've tried to unite that into the application server," said Scott Clawson, director of Oracle 9i marketing in Redwood Shores, Calif., Clawson added that Oracle includes EAI (enterprise application integration), b-to-b, business process integration, and Web services support in Oracle 9i Application Server.

BEA Systems, in San Jose, Calif., this week announced a suite of adapters that connects to a variety of applications, databases, and even mainframe systems. The application server leader also has an integration server that runs on top of its WebLogic application server.

Application adapters are a piece of several vendors' integration strategies. Last month, Microsoft released a library of more than 100 adapters, and more recently, Oracle announced that it will be using Actional's adapters to provide hooks into the Oracle 9i Application Server.

Analysts generally agree that integration issues, particularly applications and data integration, will be one of the top three to five concerns for CxOs during the next year. Users are looking for ways to integrate their applications, business processes, and eventually Web services in a much more elegant and technically efficient way.

Paul Onnen, CTO of Nordstorm.com, said his company is using Web services to integrate a mainframe in Denver with ERP systems in the company's Seattle headquarters.

"The challenge for us is more process than implementation. It's relatively painless for us to build and deploy a Web service. The biggest pain is in the business process," Onnen said.

Onnen added that, once his staff has created a Web service that will be used in the company's cosmetics business, for example, tweaking it for deployment as a Web service for another segment within the organization is simple. But before Web services can be applied, Onnen and his team have to model the business processes to decide what data goes where and to iron out any workflow kinks. "Integrating systems for Web services forces you to come up with a really good model for business processes," Onnen said.

IBM, Microsoft, and the Business Process Management Initiative standards group are creating XML-based languages for describing business processes. IBM is proposing WSFL (Web Services Flow Language), which it expects to become a standard in 2002 and the mechanism for manipulating its own business process integration software.

Some analysts caution that it will take IBM some time to pull together the far-flung pieces that are part of this initiative.

"Over time IBM will try to transform [WebSphere] into a technical architecture where all these components fit together and run on a common platform with unified management and development tools," said Massimo Pezzini, vice president and research director of application integration and middleware strategies at Gartner in Milan, Italy. "This is a very ambitious and complex thing to achieve and implement."