EAI - An Introduction

Enterprise Application Integration or EAI for short is integration technology. EAI is a buzzword that represents the task of integration of various applications so that they may share information and processes freely.



Today's business world is infinitely complex than it was a long time ago. Modern companies have a large number of applications that take care of running the business. Such diverse applications weren't a problem initially because they were meant to provide stand-alone, independent, and automated functions. The result of this diversity was a collection of stovepipe applications rather than a unified network of linked systems. But now, the companies are realizing the utmost need to integrate these independent data silos to leverage the information stored in them across the various vertical and horizontal domains as well as surmount the ever-increasing costs of building new applications.

So here Enterprise Application Integration comes into the picture.

EAI is a collection of processes, software and hardware tools, methodologies, and technologies. When implemented together, they have the aim of consolidating, connecting, and organizing all the businesses computer applications, data, and business processes (both legacy and new) into a seamlessly interfaced framework of system components that allow real-time exchange, management, and easy reformulation of the company's mission-critical information and knowledge. It is an unrestricted sharing of data throughout the networked applications or data sources in an enterprise.



When designing an Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) solution, it is important to recognize that there are different levels of integration, each with its own requirements and considerations. Successful implementation of consistent, scalable, reliable, incremental, cost-effective EAI solutions depends on the standards and methodologies that we define for these levels. It must be determined how we need to share information:

• Within an application
  
• Between applications within an enterprise
  
• Between enterprises
  
• Directly with customers
  

This architecture provides sufficient high-level consistency for interoperability and a certain degree of local freedom. For example, the architecture supports semantic diversity (different interpretations of the same data) and permits use of diverse technical tools and techniques. It also provides the basis for organizational responsibility and ownership of each layer. For example, business data persists at the application component layer and not in the middleware/EAI layer. Hence, this data is the responsibility of the application owners and not the middleware solution developers.