Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Integration Engines Turned on their Head

Integration engines have emerged over the last 5 years or so to enable businesses to orchestrate interoperability between systems and facilitate electronic data interchange. Platforms such as BizTalk from Microsoft and Ensemble from Intersystems lead in the marketplace. At the same time, industry specific standards have emerged, such as HL7 for healthcare and "adaptors" are available to help developers of BizTalk and Ensemble to work with these standards.

However, today Shahid's Healthcare IT blog pointed me at an example of this adaptor layer taken to the next stage. A whole integration engine specific to an industry vertical. This might not be a new thing, but Mirth is the first sector focussed integration engine I've seen. In this case, WebReach Inc have made their interface engine (as they call it) open source which has obvious cost advantages when you cannot spread the platform investment across other parts of the business; e.g. billing and procurement EDI.

I did notice that on the website there is no mention of SOAP as a supported messaging protocol with Mirth. Not sure if this is a deliberate ommission.

Has anyone else seen anything industry specific before?

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Read the website closer and also view the Powerpoint presentation. Soap Web services as a server and client will be supported via integrated Apache Axis.