Point-to-point integrations are routinely denounced as being complex, unmanageable, ridden with all sorts of problems and, in general, an antithesis of the kind of agile architectures promoted by Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). But what exactly are these point-to-point integrations and why are they bad? Is it about the style of interaction among participating entities or something else, for even the services in a SOA get consumed by clients that invoke them, or send messages and the interaction can be thought of as point-to-point.

This, and similar other issues, resulted in a long and lively e-mail discussion among several of us at HP. The result was a much better group understanding of various things at the core of enterprise integrations including interactions at different layers, infrastructure to support the interaction at any given layer, the style of interactions themselves and the process of creating the integrations that result into these interactions.

The whole discussion might have got burried in our InBoxes along myriad other company-internal communications, had it not been for a few good folks who took the time to convert the raw e-mail messages into a much more readable article. Thanks to them that most of the points have been captured and presented in the online article Moving from point-to-point Integrations to SOA based Integrations.

If you find the organization and flow a bit non-smooth at places, you now know the reason -- it was not written for publication to start with. Nonetheless the points made are quite valid and go much deeper than most high level corporate-speak or marketing literature.