A Data Approach to Application Integration.(SmartDB Corp's Workbench DBMS utility) (Product...

As computer systems proliferate in the enterprise, application integration is becoming a frequently heard buzzword. Because of the boom in enterprise resource planning software adoption, plummeting hardware costs, mergers and acquisitions, and the year 2000 problem, companies are being forced to integrate more and more disparate applications, according to Bob Bessin, director of marketing for SmartDB Corp. (Palo Alto, Calif., www.smartdb.com).

Much of the talk about application integration has focused on component-based or process-level integration systems, which tie appli