RAI is an evolutionary and incremental improvement in the maturing practice of Enterprise Application Integration. It is an improved approach driven by real world business needs that promotes speed of implementation, ease of change, and cost-effectiveness. RAI is not another new technology or IT standard, rather it is a pragmatic implementation of widely used and proven integration technologies, standards and best practices. RAI leverages the existing and proven technologies deployed in today’s enterprises and treats the introduction of new and emerging technology standards that are heralded as the next "silver bullet", such as web services, with healthy skepticism.

Rapid Application Integration (RAI) reduces project implementation times, promotes accelerated Return On Investment (ROI) and mitigates risk in integration projects. RAI products are light-weight, agile and do not require in-depth IT knowledge or programming skills to use.

WHAT ARE THE PROBLEMS WITH EAI TODAY?
From a business perspective, there are still several problems in today’s integration market space:

• Lack of Simplicity - As managing information technology becomes more complex, due to the rapid pace of change and the emergence of new and sometimes competing industry “standards”, simplicity becomes more difficult to achieve. This makes initial integration slow, and ongoing maintenance difficult, which in turn makes integration expensive.

• High Expense - Traditional integration solutions have failed to gain widespread acceptance because they are too expensive for all but the largest of companies and the most critical of applications. This makes EAI an underutilized technology due to the large initial cost and even larger cost of implementation.

• Hard to Find Skill Set - Traditional integration solutions require IT staff skilled not only in the underlying protocols, data formats and back-end systems, but also in the development environment of the integration tool itself. Staffing today’s integration projects is a real problem adding higher risk and increasing the expense of already complex implementation projects.

• Large Footprint - Traditional integration solutions are an IT discipline in themselves requiring almost as much project planning and support as the original ERP implementations. Once again, this adds unnecessary risk into integration projects, causing slow and inflexible implementations which lead to increased expense and extended ROI.

HOW DOES JUNOT ADDRESS THESE PROBLEMS?
Unlike competing products, NLINK is not a development tool aimed at programmers. Deployed since 1998, NLINK is a mature product that was designed from the ground-up to address the issues of Rapid Application Integration. Fast to Implement and easy to change, NLINK’s patented architecture delivers a configuration-driven solution requiring no end-user programming and no in depth knowledge of communications protocols or data formats.

• Simple (Faster) - NLINK is a configuration-based product; no end-user programming is required. In fact, NLINK was designed from the ground-up to target companies and integration projects that do not have large IT staffs. Underlying details of the data formats, protocols, transports, encoding methods and application interfaces are hidden from the end-user. The NLINK Configuration Module presents the integration task in a logical and consistent manner guiding the end-user through the entire process.

• Cost-Effective (Cheaper) - NLINK is component-based. NLINK CoNNectors, eXtenders and Modules can be mixed and matched to create the optimal integration solution. NLINK customers pay only for the components that they actually use. Over time, as the integration project evolves, incremental costs are added only when significant new functionality is required.

• Easy to Find Skill Set (Better) - NLINK allows business users and IT staff alike to design, build and deploy interfaces between systems. No programming knowledge or in-depth information technology skill set is required to complete a successful integration project, on-time and within budget. Experience has shown us that new users become productive immediately upon completion of initial Training.

• Small Footprint (Better) - NLINK installs in minutes and once installed, allows rapid-prototyping of integration interfaces. NLINK is configuration-based so changes to existing interfaces can be made quickly and easily. NLINK's small footprint still delivers an enterprise class integration solution that is reliable, scalable, flexible and manageable.

NLINK’s Rapid Application Integration approach enables all organizations, no matter their size, to quickly and easily create, connect, and manage integration solutions that liberate all of their information assets.


CONTACT
For more information regarding the technical details of the NLINK product suite please contact moreinfo@junotsystems.com. For sales and pricing information regarding the NLINK product suite please contact sales@junotsystems.com.