Throughout the history of the IT industry, integration has been an important part of most projects. Whether it is integration of transactions, data, or processes, each has challenges and associated patterns and antipatterns. In an age of mobile devices, social networks, and cloud services, and big data analytics, integration is more important than ever, but the scope of the challenge for IT projects has changed. Partner APIs, social networks, physical sensors and devices, all of these and more are important sources of capability or insight. It is no longer sufficient to integrate resources under control of the enterprise, because many important resources are in the ecosystem beyond enterprise boundaries. With this as the basic tenet, we address these questions: What are the current integration patterns that help enterprises become and remain competitive? How do you choose when to use which pattern? What is the topology for a "composable business"? And how do you accelerate the process of implementation through intelligent choice of supporting integration middleware? This IBM® Redbooks® publication guides integration practitioners and architects in choosing integration patterns and technologies.

This paper reexamines the relationship between trade integration and business cycle synchronization (BCS) using new value-added trade data for 63 advanced and emerging economies during 1995–2012. In a panel framework, we identify a strong positive impact of trade intensity on BCS—conditional on various controls, global common shocks and country-pair heterogeneity—that is absent when gross trade data are used. That effect is bigger in crisis times, pointing to trade as an important crisis propagation mechanism. Bilateral intra-industry trade and trade specialization correlation also appear to increase co-movement, indicating that not only the intensity but also the type of trade matters. Finally, we show that dependence on Chinese final demand in value-added terms amplifies the international spillovers and synchronizing impact of growth shocks in China.

The book includes seventeen excellent researched and documented papers that reflect the diversity of thought, ideas and experiences related to IWRM. They draw from an extensive, inclusive and geographically representative range of theoretical propositions and practical examples. These include the implementation status of the IWRM concept at local, basin, regional and national levels; its appropriateness for the twenty-first century; main implementation gaps from the institutional, legal, policy, governance, management and technical viewpoints; the likelihood that IWRM’s entrenchment in laws, regulations and policies has led to smoother implementation and the reasons why that has been the case; reflexions on whether the attention given to IWRM is pushing other alternatives to the policy periphery; and the new conceptual constructions that can be put forward for discussion in the international arena. For the development and water communities it is imperative to debate and reach towards more illustrative conclusions regarding whether the promotion of the IWRM concept and its actual implementation status have been beneficial for development and how the notion could evolve to achieve this end. In-depth objective and constructive discussions, arguments, proposals and ideas are put forward for analysis by all interested parties. The book has the objective of fostering scholarly exchange, encouraging intellectual debate and promoting the advancement of knowledge and understanding of IWRM as a concept, as a goal per se and as a strategy towards development goals. This book was published as a special issue of the International Journal of Water Resources Development.

While business functions such as manufacturing, operations, and marketing often utilize various software applications, they tend to operate without the ability to interact with each other and exchange data. This provides a challenge to gain an enterprise-wide view of a business and to assist real-time decision making. Service-Driven Approaches to Architecture and Enterprise Integration addresses the issues of integrating assorted software applications and systems by using a service driven approach. Supporting the dynamics of business needs, this book highlights the tools, techniques, and governance aspects of design, and implements cost-effective enterprise integration solutions. It is a valuable source of information for software architects, SOA practitioners, and software engineers as well as researchers and students in pursuit of extensible and agile software design.

Enterprise solutions have emerged as promising tools for integrating and extending business processes across business functions. Supplying a clear and comprehensive introduction to the field, this book provides a detailed description of enterprise information integration-from the development of enterprise systems to extended enterprise information

The ever growing number of application scenarios for IT systems leads to a significant increase in their number and hence to a level of complexity that has grown tremendously in comparison with early IT installations by the mid of the past decade. In numerous attempts to integrate these diverging application stacks, various prominent methods have emerged in the past, most recently the topic of EAI which strives to achieve a consolidated view at diverse application systems. However, the emergence and rise of cloud-based services leads to new challenges to deal with. Usage of offerings from a no further specified cloud appears appealing for IT decision makers since it promises cost savings while even enhancing flexibility to quickly respond to changing market needs. To further support this idea, this work focuses on the aspect of inter-organisational networks that are characterised by short setup times and short time to market in order to achieve innovative products emerging from the cooperation between different actors. In this context, proper backing by dedicated ICT components is one of the key challenges. This book therefore demonstrates how portal systems, acting as intermediary between providers and consumers, can be embedded into networked enterprises by providing seamless access to all relevant information. To achieve this, this book presents a generic architecture that can serve as a blueprint for future implementations for the type of enterprise portals introduced previously and focuses on integration of external services in a user-centric manner, concentrating on the user and his specific needs to achieve productivity and user satisfaction gains. Moreover, secure communication facilities allow to consider the current application and/or user context to control exchange of information between different applications integrated on the portal platform.

Over the past decade or so, systems integration has become a key factor in the operations, strategy and competitive advantage of major corporations in a wide variety of sectors (e.g. computing, automotive, telecommunications, military systems and aerospace). Systems integration is a strategic task that pervades business management not only at the technical level but also at the management and strategic levels. This book shows how and why this new kind of systems integration has evolved into an emerging model of industrial organization whereby firms, and groups of firms, join together different types of knowledge, skill and activity, as well as hardware, software, and human resources to produce new products for the marketplace. This book is the first to systematically explore systems integration from a business and innovation perspective. Contributors delve deeply into the nature, dimensions and dynamics of the new systems integration, deploying research and analytical techniques from a wide variety of disciplines including, the theory of the firm, the history of technology, industrial organization, regional studies, strategic management, and innovation studies. This wealth of research capability provides deep insights into the new model of systems integration and supports this with an abundance of empirical evidence. The book is organized in three main parts. The first part focuses on the history of systems integration. Contributors trace the early history of systems integration using different industrial examples. The second part presents theoretical and analytical aspects of systems integration. Contributions concentrate on the regulatory and cognitive features of systems integration, the relationships between systems integration and regional competitive advantage, and the way in which systems integration supports the competitive advantage of firms. The third part takes industry and firm-level approaches. Contributions focus on different sectors and highlight the specificity of systems integration in various industrial domains, stressing its importance for systems integration in the case of complex capital goods, such as aircraft and telecommunications equipment, as well as consumer goods, such as personal computers and automobiles.

Virtual Enterprise Integration: Technological and Organizational Perspectives addresses the emergent research and development issues for the most-advanced enterprise organizational paradigm of today's world - the virtual enterprise paradigm. Virtual Enterprise Integration: Technological and Organizational Perspectives integrates the contributions by renowned international researchers and scientists and is virtually the first book focusing solely on the problem of virtual enterprise integration. This book is a guide that gives readers a broader perspective of VE integration requirements and raises their awareness on which technology and how technology can serve the needs of an expanding and increasingly competitive organizational model.

"This book explores technical integration challenges with a focus on identifying a viable solution on how to enable rich, flexible, and responsive information links, in support of the changing business operations across organizations"--Provided by publisher.

Developing economies around the world must balance fast growth with traditional values to achieve the greatest success. Issues related to rural innovation, knowledge management, and emerging technologies are at the forefront of every developing country’s concerns. Promoting Socio-Economic Development through Business Integration builds on available literature in the field of socio-economic development in developing countries, providing further research opportunities in this field. Research scholars, academics, policymakers, government officials, and more will find this book to be a crucial source of knowledge to their respective disciplines.