1 Chapter 1. Application interoperability overview The heterogeneous computing environment that exists either within organizations or across the extended enterprise make support for application interoperability essential for driving end-to-end business processes, providing seamless experience for customers, and for collaborating with business partners and suppliers. In this chapter, we provide an overview of application interoperability starting from the drivers for interoperability, and the review of different interoperability models. Finally, we introduce interoperability taxonomy and structures for analyzing and designing interoperability solutions. This chapter contains the following sections: Drivers for application interoperability Application interoperability models Approaches for interoperability Elements of interoperability © Copyright IBM Corp. 2006. All rights reserved. 3