Long ago, enterprises understood the need to make their business based on information technologies, in order to make more agile their business processes and provide a fully quality service. For long time, enterprise applications ran in an isolated way. Turning information available to the outside was unthinkable. Globalization, business partnersâ lobbies and the growing up of e-commerce call for a change. Nowadays, an integrated vision of partnerâs business is essential and inevitable — Software integration turn into a need for contemporaneous markets.
Software Engineering has been making many efforts in this way. However, currently, there is no systematic methodology which can be applied to any integration problem. Software integration is a complex problem which need to be analyzed case by case.
Solve the integration problem between brokers and insurance companies at I2S is the main purpose of the work reported in this dissertation, by proposing an integration architecture. The definition of this architecture implies a careful analysis of what integration process should be, establishing the points which should be considered to achieve an acceptable degree of integration. There is two possible architectures investigated as solution — Point-to-point connections based on web services and bus architectures provided by Enterprise Service Bus technology. The two architectures are evaluated separately from case studies and concept proofs. Finally, they are compared highlighting the strength and weakness of each one based on points considered relevant to the decision to be taken.
A summary of the work done throughout this project is presented in order to verify that the original goals were fulfilled and final considerations are made about the software integration. To conclude, future work is enumerated.