Enterprise Application Integration: EAI

Business integration has become a major issue for many companies. There are many reasons for this heightened interest: the explosive growth of the Internet, the pressures of competition, new business models and the need to homogenize processes between internal and partner approaches, to name but a few. A new market sector has emerged to meet this need, dedicated to software that enables better business integration. The first offering in this direction was MOM (Message Oriented Middleware), designed to facilitate links between different information systems; then came message brokers, followed by business management and workflow solutions. This whole market is sometimes referred to as EAI (Enterprise Application Integration), although initially EAI focused on integrating software packages such as SAP with either legacy mainframe applications, or more recent workstation applications. Nowadays, EAI encompasses all these issues.

There are a myriad of EAI tools and products, each claiming to provide a global solution. Here are a few keys to what EAI really is.