Integrating autonomous enterprise systems through dependable CORBA objects

Integrating autonomous enterprise systems allows the cooperation among applications belonging to distinct systems. As an example, this problem shows up when integrating software services of large departments and organizations in e-government initiatives. This paper studies, in the context of the Unitary Network of the Italian Public Administration, the problem of increasing the availability of services exported by an autonomous enterprise system towards others. In particular we show how a fault tolerant CORBA system, namely the Interoperable Replication Logic (IRL), can be used to increase such an availability by building a replicated cooperative gateway that wraps enterprise applications.