Enterprises are beginning to recognize the need to integrate disparate applications for a variety of reasons, and not all of which are IT-related. Many of these enterprises are seen to be
re-engineering their business processes to accommodate customer-focused views that require close co-operation between previously stand-alone applications.
Maintaining disparate or even duplicate databases owned by each application wastes time and creates problems. To accelerate the problem, older systems do not communicate effectively with new systems mergers and acquisitions create incompatible technology and everyone and everything must wait until transaction and data processing are completed before anything else can be accomplished.
For example, the problem arises when a financial institution runs on several databases, and...
