Fundamentals of Enterprise Applications

When people hear the word application, they immediately
think of the apps for iPhones, iPods, iPads, etc. Enterprise applications show
how the company works, and are used to solve company-wide problems, not
departmental problems. These applications are put in place to improve the
efficiency and productivity of the company. They are usually too complex and
costly for a small business or an individual to use. They manipulate, display,
and store large amounts of data that is usually very detailed and hard to
decipher. There is no universal list of characteristics, but they usually cover
performance, scalability, and robustness.

The software has different categories such as, accounting
software, business intelligence, customer relations management, database
(including master data management), content management systems, and enterprise
resource planning. There are blurred lines between some of these categories
that make delimitation complicated. Designing these applications can be
difficult.

You have to meet many requirements, and in doing so create
other requirements to be met. These requirements need to be balanced by
considering certain things such as budgeting, business goals, time until
delivery, the amount of people used to develop, test, and maintain the program,
how many users need to be able to get into the program, the performance and
ease of use, hardware, security, and how long the program must be used. Without
considering these issues, the program will end up not working the way that it
was intended.

Enterprise application integration ensures the consistency
of the information in multiple systems. There are two patterns of this,
mediation and federation. Mediation acts as a broker between these multiple
systems. After new information is added or a transaction is completed, an
integration module is notified. The module then makes the changes to other
parts of the application. Federation is an overarching facade over the multiple
systems. Event calls from anywhere outside the program are interpreted. Then
the Enterprise application integration shows only relevant information. These
two patterns are often used concurrently. 

You can improve your company’s enterprise applications with four
different steps. The first step is to track your service-level agreement
automatically and not manually. This can show the effectiveness of your
availability. The next step would be to monitor the program. To do this you
need to be able to log into your application with a username and password.  Third, try to reduce the amount of single
points of failure.  By reviewing the
architecture of the program, you can correct these failures by clustering,
redundancy, load balancing, and virtualization. Finally you need to plan for
disaster recover. Know what you are going to do if something happens to the
program.

Without these applications, many businesses would not be
able to run as efficiently as they do. They store and use data to keep the
company running at a smooth pace. Integration between the multiple systems is
important to keep things moving and to keep the company from going under when
it shows errors within the company.

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