Enterprise Application Integration: Integration and Utilization of SAS Products

The enterprise today requires many applications (from multiple vendors) concurrently running in parallel on multiple platforms. Managing these applications and the resources these applications require sharing data and meta-data across the enterprise, and integrating these applications for cross functionality has been until recently intractable. This is due to reasons such as inherent differences in functionality, differences in program languages, lack of standard communication methods. With the advent of CORBA, JAVA and Enterprise Application Integration frameworks, these issues are beginning to be addressed with some success. This paper presents an Enterprise Application Integration framework based on an N-tiered, distributed, O-O architecture and allows for the development, testing and deployment of custom applications as well as for application integration of third party products. Five unique architectures are introduced within this framework. When operating together these architectures provide a complete mechanism for application integration that is scalable, extensible, and robust. In addition, it is shown how various SAS products such as SAS Warehouse Administrator, Data Miner, Enterprise Reporter, STAT, Graph, BASE, CONNECT, SHARE, ACCESS, EIS, and SAS AF can be incorporated into different components of the framework. This paper is intended for advanced audience.