Straight talk on EAI adapters

Sean McGrath gives us the business on EAI adapters. What a breath of fresh air. A truly useful economics of integration that lines up with the EAI vision if your intent on taking proprietariness out of the picture.

Here's how I interpret his hints toward an alternative for 80% of the cases a proprietary EAI solution might be purchased:

• A standards-based exchange format (like XML).
• A commodity TP monitor for simple transactions (like Apache, take your pick) (with a simple means of exchange).
• Commodity persistence (and perhaps some caching) (take your pick based on your budget, needs, and assorted risks).
• Finally a simple set of rules for coordination.

The hard part is already proprietary to your legacy applications and ERPs. Sometimes the term "adapter" seems intended to imply "easy to implement". Unfortunately customization, vendor quality and the "stovepipe" nature of EAI products themselves get in the way.