The world of IT system integration is overloaded with acronyms and geeky terminology. Moreover, combinations of terms such as XML, SOA, orchestration, BPM, and ontology might create an impression of ongoing R&D efforts. But this is not entirely true. The previously mentioned keywords refer actually to model-driven integration. There is no doubt that IT system integration is one of the most widely used services in the whole IT sector and has effect on all of us either using IT directly or indirectly.

Tigerprises talked to Dr. Peep Küngas (pictured), board member and founder of SOA Trader, who is today one of the leading specialists in the field of service integration and semantic interoperability in Estonia.

The vision

The vision of IT system integration in leveraging new value through embedding value-added services. It can be best described with an example such as the following. Just imagine that you are looking for a special new filter for your 100l aquarium. The traditional way to find one would be to go to the nearest pet-shop and see what they have on sale.

This could be fine, but it might not give you the best deal. You might not get the most suitable filter produced or you might not get the best price. In the (near) future world however where all the IT systems will be integrated you might get a totally different deal. A special web-site monitoring all the offerings from all aquarium shops, all the manufacturers, airlines, hotels, traveling agencies etc might make you a stunning offer: “You can find a filter in the nearby shop for 200 euros OR you can have one delivered to you from the manufacturer for 150 + 10 (delivery cost) euros in two weeks OR you can take a trip to Munich to buy a filter for 100 euros and for another 100 stay for the Octoberfest.”

OK, this example might be a bit futuristic, but there are many places where IT system integration and web services are creating new value already today. For example the Estonian e-health system will soon bring together all the health info from all the hospitals, clinics, dentists and give a much better overview of the patients situation to the doctor.

The challenges

Majority of the information, needed for increasing added value, through integrated IT systems is already out there somewhere. We, humans, have been hunter-gatherers since the early days of our evolution and these patterns of behavior are impossible to forget. So if we get access to terabyte size storage we never delete any information – we collect and collect…because who knows perhaps it will become useful at some point of time. This of course makes the integration of data a difficult task. We must find the IT system components providing necessary information, match the information in different repositories and “translate” it for different users. This is a challenging task and given the enormous amount of data and a number of databases it would make sense to automate this process. Automated integration of course must be quite intelligent and achieving sufficient degree of such automation is a challenge in IT industry.

SOA Trader gives a helping hand

One of the main aims of SOA Trader is to bring together developers, service providers, web services and integration tool providers to form an online community for enabling cost-efficient value creation for service requesters. Soatrader.com is a marketplace where you can buy/sell licenses to different web-services or data sources and where you can also find co-developers and exchange information on tools and services. Thus go and check it out. And if you have a web service, which is looking for an application, don’t hesitate to register it at soatrader.com!