Enterprise information integration using a peer to peer approach

The integration of enterprise information systems has unique requirements and frequently poses problems to business partners. We discuss specific integration issues for micro-sized enterprises on the special case of independent sales agencies and their suppliers. We argue that the enterprise information systems of those independent enterprises are technically best represented by equal peers. Therefore, we have designed the Peer-To-Peer (P2P) integration architecture VIANA for the integration of enterprise information systems. Its architecture provides materializing P2P integration using optimistic replication. It is applicable to inter- and intraorganizational integration scenarios. It is accomplished by the propagation of write operations between peers. We argue that this type of integration can be realized with no alteration of the participating information systems.