Welcome to the SIA website. As of December 2008 we are in the process of populating this website with public information pertaining to integration projects at The University of Arizona. As such, many of the pages on this site do not yet have content. Please check back in the coming weeks.

The Need for Integration

Integration is a key concern for today's increasingly heterogeneous, distributed ecosystem of enterprise applications. As diversity in the enterprise application technology landscape, and points of integration increase, users' expectations of coherent, uniform accessibility to data, services and business processes—across applications and access points—are growing dramatically.

As these trends progress, traditional methods of point-to-point application integration become increasingly untenable. The brittleness, redundancy, and inefficiency inherent in these approaches represent a significant threat to the Mosaic project—from an implementation timeframe perspective, as well as the long-term robustness and manageability of the environment.

Integration Goals

The following represent the high-level objectives of UA integration efforts:

• Rapidly deliver reliable, sustainable and manageable solutions for inter-application and infrastructure integration
• Eliminate, or reduce as much as possible, the brittleness and redundancy inherent in “one-off” point-to-point integrations
• Balance long-range architectural vision with short-term tactical needs
• Facilitate integration standardization, reuse and best practices across all Mosaic project initiatives

Defining the Scope of Integration

The scope/purview of “integration,” for the purposes of the Mosaic project, will be a subset of what is often associated with “EAI” (Enterprise Application Integration) and “SOA” (Service Oriented Architecture) frameworks. Some applicable areas include:

• Identification of application integration points
• Exposing application components as externally “consumable” services
• Service interface definition
• Service discovery, governance and life-cycle management
• Service composition and orchestration
• Integration with “infrastructural” services (identity management, directory services, etc)
• Data synchronization/propagation across applications
• Connectivity—protocol adapters, connectors, bridges/gateways
• Data/content formats and transformations (semantic integration)
• Message generation, routing and delivery patterns (synchronous, asynchronous, pub/sub, “fire-and-forget”, idempotent, event-driven, transactional, etc)
• Message integrity and security (transport security, encryption, digital signatures, etc)

The Role of UITS' “Systems Integration and Architecture” (SIA) Team

The following represent the primary responsibilities and objectives of the SIA team, within the scope of the Mosaic project:

• Consult with the technical leads of the various project initiatives to identify integration concerns, drivers, requirements and priorities
• Identify commonalities across project initiatives to assist in architecting common integration components/frameworks
• Develop integration tasks and roadmap/milestones to be integrated within Mosaic project plan
• Develop and maintain relevant artifacts, such as best practices, reference architecture, design patterns and service metadata
• Architect and implement integration “middleware”, such as a service registry, service bus, identity management, authentication/authorization frameworks, as well as common (“infrastructural”) services related to integration
• Liaise with technical leads to identify appropriate integration patterns, opportunities for service reuse, and best approaches to addressing integration challenges
• Consult with/train project developers on technical integration tasks