Before You Leap

April 9, 2001 —

Planning to adopt an integration tool for your large organization? Terence O'Donovan, director of technology for DataMirror in Toronto, an enterprise application integration platform provider, suggests considering these points first.

Scalability Replacing point-to-point interfaces with a tool becomes senseless if the tool can only easily manage a small percentage of those interfaces.

Performance The tool must have a high throughput of data.

Ease of Deployment The ability to change certain parameters (source name, target name and so on) is essential.

Centralized Administration Interfaces must be able to be administered automatically and from a central place.

Straight Through Processing/Zero Latency The ability to deliver target data as soon as possible after reading the source data is important for many applications.

Heterogeneous Sources To turn data into information, you must be able to join data from heterogeneous sources.

Security Support for various security standards is required. Good, hard-to-reverse standards at the moment include Secure Sockets Layer, IPSec and Pretty Good Privacy.

Partners For large enterprisewide projects, a company must have good partnerships with respectable systems integrators, with a base staff already trained in the product.

Training The better the training program the quicker the enterprise will realize its return on investment.

Support A good, tiered support function (offering up to 24/7 telephone support and a knowledge base) will help alleviate inevitable problems.

User Group An organized user base -- to share experiences, good practices, tips and tricks -- is invaluable in heightening the ROI of the project.

References Before investing in a tool, always check references from well-respected companies that have that tool in production.

CIO