To be fair and honest, I took the assignment with a bit of apprehension. I knew that role of an integration consultant will be demanding because success in this role depends a lot on the other aspect than purely being technical.

Interestingly, in an integration scenario both the parties whose applications are going to be integrated are very clear about their requirement and highly inflexible. Huh…well the world has good people as well J

It’s the job of the integration solution provider to suggest the optimized solution and bargain, negotiate with the application owners to support the interface requirement or solution.

The experience has been very interesting and funny at times as well. Many technical guys whose application was integrated, never been able to understand that there is nothing “specific” about the webservice provided by XI/PI.  XI/PI provides the webservice which is industry standard which works the standard way.

I think it common that the application team will come up and would ask to implement business validation or rule in middleware because they don’t want to make any change in their existing application even if they have flexibility to do so. It takes a lot of effort to make them understand that it is better to have business validation/rules within the boundary of the application which is catering that business process.

Well, this will be long if I keep on writing. So, stopping it here and would try to cover other things in next blog.