Enterprise application integration

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is defined as the uses of software and computer systems architectural principles to integrate a set of enterprise computer applications.

EAI Explained

In today’s competitive and dynamic business environment, applications such as Supply Chain Management, Customer Relationship Management, Business Intelligence and Integrated Collaboration environments have become imperative for organizations that need to maintain their competitive advantage. Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is the process of linking these applications and others in order to realize financial and operational competitive advantages.

One of the challenges facing modern organizations is giving all their workers complete, transparent and real-time access to information. Many of the legacy applications still in use today were developed using arcane and proprietary technologies, thus creating information silos across departmental lines within organizations. These systems did not enable seamless movement of information from one application to the other. EAI, as a discipline, aims to alleviate many of these problems, as well as create new paradigms for truly lean proactive organizations.

EAI intends to transcend the simple goal of linking applications, and attempts to enable new and innovative ways of leveraging organizational knowledge to create further competitive advantages for the enterprise.

When different systems can’t share their data effectively, they create information bottlenecks that require human intervention in the form of decision making or data entry. With a properly deployed EAI architecture, organizations are able to focus most of their efforts on their value creating core competencies instead of focusing on workflow management.

Improving connectivity

Enterprise Application Integration has increased in importance because enterprise computing often takes the form of islands of automation. This occurs when the value of individual systems are not maximized due to partial or full isolation. If integration is applied without following a structured EAI approach, point-to-point connections grow across an organization. Dependencies are added on an impromptu basis, resulting in a tangled mess that is difficult to maintain. This is commonly referred to as spaghetti, an allusion to the programming equivalent of spaghetti code. For example:

The number of n connections needed to have a fully-meshed point-to-point connections is given by $\frac{n(n-1)}{2}$ . Thus, for 10 applications to be fully integrated point-to-point, $\frac{(10)(9)}{2}$ , or 45 point-to-point connections are needed.

However, EAI is not just about sharing data between applications; it focuses on sharing both business data and business process. Attending to EAI involves looking at the system of systems, which involves large scale inter-disciplinary problems with multiple, heterogeneous, distributed systems that are embedded in networks at multiple levels

Communication architectures

Currently, it is thought that the best approach to EAI is to use an Enterprise service bus (ESB), which connects numerous, independent systems together. Although other approaches have been explored, including connecting at the database or user-interface level, the ESB approach has been adopted as the strategic winner. Individual applications can publish messages to the bus and subscribe to receive certain messages from the bus. Each application only requires one connection to the bus. The message bus approach can be extremely scalable and highly evolvable.

Enterprise Application Integration is related to middleware technologies such as message-oriented middleware (MOM), and data representation technologies such as XML. Newer EAI technologies involve using web services as part of service-oriented architecture as a means of integration. Enterprise Application Integration tends to be data centric. In the near future, it will come to include content integration and business processes.

EAI Implementation Pitfalls

70% of the time EAI projects fail, most of these failures are not due to the software itself or technical difficulties, but due to management issues. EAIIC European Chairman Steve Craggs has outlined the 7 main pitfalls undertaken by companies using EAI systems and explains solutions to these problems.

Constant Change
- The very nature of EAI is dynamic and requires dynamic project managers to manage their implementation.
Lack of EAI experts
- EAI requires knowledge of many issues and technical aspects.
Competing Standards
- Within the EAI field, the paradox is that EAI standards themselves are not universal.
EAI is a tool paradigm
- EAI is not a tool, but rather a system and should be implemented as such.
Interface Design
- Different processes and departments have different interface requirements. There should be a common consensus on the final outcome.
Emerging Requirements
- EAI implementations should be extensible and modular to allow for future changes.
Accountability
- Since so many departments have many conflicting requirements, there should be clear accountability for the system's final structure.

Advantages and Disadvantages

Advantages
- Real time information access among systems
- Streamlines business processes and helps raise organizational efficiency.
- Maintains information integrity across multiple systems

Disadvantages
- Prohibitively high development costs, especially for SMBs.
- EAI implementations are very time consuming, and need a lot of resources.

The Future of EAI

EAI technologies are still being developed and there still isn’t a consensus on the ideal approach or the correct group of technologies a company should use. A common pitfall is to use other proprietary technologies that claim to be open and extensible but create vendor lock-in.

EAI Vendors

External links

Integration Consortium
Enterprise Integration Patterns
IBM Patterns for e-Business (includes section on integration patterns)
Microsoft Patterns and Practices (includes section on integration patterns)

References