Evaluating Service Oriented Integration Technologies
ever since my article on Evaluating Service based integration technologies appeared on the Microsoft Architect Journal, I've been receiving queries from various interesting parts of the world - such as this one I received today:
"My name is XXX, I am the Systems Architect for YYY, one of the largest banks in the Central American Region. We are currently evaluating middleware technologies to integrate a series of applications and I found the i-MATE method which you developed to be extremely useful. Without consuming much of your time, I was simply wondering if you could give me any resource, web-page or such where I could find your works or simply more information on the i-MATE process such as the knowledge base of generic requirements. Any such documentation would be of much help for us."
So, attached is a sample version of the i-MATE evaluation spreadsheet, based on an EAI evaluation project we worked on a few years ago...
Now, a very important note is that given the development and adoption of SOA and web services, almost all integration projects that I see nowadays are using web services standards. So it is very important to also consider the SOA and Web Services related criteria (such as below) as the most important part of the evaluation.
Ian and I have also documented our earlier experience with the i-MATE process in this IEEE Software article.