Integration fabric

Status: complete (published 2026-08-19). Scope was finalized at kickoff with maintainer POV; see brief.md, findings.md, vendors.md, sources.md.

Scope inventory (v0)

• Current estate: SOA and ESB heritage, API management, EDI and B2B, iPaaS, event backbone, workflow and BPM engines, RPA estate, legacy adapters (mainframe, file and batch)
• Agent-era: MCP tool layer and MCP gateways (distinct from LLM gateways), tool registries and connector catalogs, agent-to-agent protocols and cross-enterprise federation, the RPA-to-agent migration path
• Safe action: OAuth on-behalf-of and token exchange, idempotency and compensation (saga) patterns for agent-initiated actions, human-approval workflow integration, rate limiting
• Patterns: experience/process/system API layering, event-driven agent triggers, durable long-running orchestration

Challenged-default candidates

MCP gateway products vs extending existing API gateways; iPaaS agent connectors vs governed APIs; RPA replacement urgency vs coexistence. Each track proposes its final list at kickoff.

Files

brief.md, findings.md, vendors.md, sources.md are created from ../_TEMPLATE/ at kickoff.

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Source: research/R03-integration-fabric/README.md in the evidence repository behind this site.