Mountain View, CA October 29, 2002 When it comes to integration, technology company HP clearly feels that centralization is key. The company is establishing a centralized integration competency center to merge and manage vital business information throughout the company.
The integration competency center (ICC) a term first coined by Roy Schulte, vice president of research at technology consultancy Gartner is a holistic integration approach that coordinates across departments, establishing formalized, efficient ways of exchanging information from one centralized management location.
"Enterprises need a centralized integration competency center and a repository of application integration meta-data to drive down the cost and redundancies in corporate IT," said Roy Schulte, vice president of research at Gartner. "For companies that are seeking the Holy Grail of seamless connectivity between their internal departments and external partners, an integration competency center is the most effective way to work toward this."
HP, the result of Hewlett-Packard's merger with Compaq, is working with solution provider Contivo to support its ICC. Building on Contivo's Enterprise Integration Modeling (EIM) solution, HP's center is charged with delivering reusable and accessible information about its applications and systems, enabling cross-functional and cross-enterprise business processes.
With this enterprisewide initiative, HP is looking to benefit from Contivo's semantic modeling integration approach, which allows data to be shared and reused across disparate systems.
"Contivo's solution is designed to support the ICC concept and the depth of their integration methodology helps ensure that we build up a formalized, efficient way of exchanging and coordinating information throughout the company," said Michael Baker, HP's information technology officer.
Through the ICC, Contivo's EIM Solution will automate the transformation of data used by disparate pre-merger HP and Compaq applications, customers and the large network of buyers and suppliers through an enterprise vocabulary. Once created, this standard vocabulary, which is a collection of the meta-data found in the semantic models, can be shared and reused across the enterprise.
"The ability to effectively implement and manage message and data standards and reuse components across the new HP is an extremely valuable proposition," said James McKinley, manager of the center for HP. The technology also analyzes and models the relationships between applications and automatically configures integration run-time code to improve the implementation and maintenance of enterprisewide integration. When a new system or application comes online, it can immediately "plug in," given a set of common and consistent standards.
"For most organizations, integration of IT systems and applications is a time-consuming, decentralized and project-oriented effort," said Indra Mohan, CEO of Contivo. "With the ICC, HP is taking an innovative, centralized approach to integration that should allow them unparalleled coordination of IT throughout each department and enable the company to realize the value of each technology investment as it relates to achieving business objectives."
