EAI

Acronym for Enterprise Application Integration. EAI is the unrestricted sharing of data and business processes throughout the networked applications or data sources within an organization as well as among organizations. As enterprises grow and recognize the need for their information and applications to have the ability to be transferred across and shared between systems, Companies are investing in EAI in order to streamline processes and keep all the elements of the enterprise interconnected.

If you insist that your Accounting Application should communicate with Stock Handling Application, well that is where EAI starts to kick in. If today you can buy flowers at a web site, it could be because an EAI solution is behind that page and fires the command to a flower shop, it makes life easier for you the end user.

EAI involves integration at the following levels:

• Business Process Integration (BPI)
• Application Integration
• Data Integration
• Platform Integration

An EAI solution makes business solutions more efficient by allowing internal applications to communicate seamlessly and efficiently. It also allows automated workflows with or without human intervention. Further more, it makes businesses more efficient by making inter-enterprise communication totally seamless. Companies can communicate at worldwide level as efficient as the Internet is

EAI software is characterized by the ability to integrate applications within the enterprise as well as across enterprises, Infrastructure adaptability, support for multiple integration topologies and power to handle complexity of Application integration is complex.

The Hurwitz Group EAI Market Segmentation identifies five hierarchical categories of integration. They are:

• Business Process Integration
  • Process of workflow modeling
• Application Integration
  • Data translation and transformation, rules based routing, pre-programmed adapters, monitoring and management tools
• Component Integration
  • Application servers
• Data Integration
  • Tools for extracting, transforming and loading data
• Platform Integration
  • Messaging

The higher a product lives on the stack, the more abstraction the product aims to provide from coding. The framework provides an abstraction of complexity so that it is easier to deploy and time to market is faster.

Microsoft BizTalk Server 2000 provides a powerful Web-based development and execution environment that integrates loosely coupled, long-running business processes, both within and between businesses. BizTalk Server can handle transactions that run as long as weeks or months, not just minutes or hours.

BizTalk Server 2000 features include the ability to design and use XLANG schedules, integrate existing applications, define document specifications and specification transformations, and monitor and log run-time activity.

The server provides a standard gateway for sending and receiving documents across the Internet, as well as providing a range of services that ensure data integrity, delivery, security, and support for the BizTalk Framework and other key document formats.

In addition to BizTalk Server 2000, Microsoft, with industry partners, has led innovation on enabling technologies that are necessary for Internet-based business solutions, including BizTalk Framework 2.0, which is a platform-independent, Extensible Markup Language (XML) framework for application integration and electronic commerce.

To start with, here are some links that provide useful information on EAI:

   • ITtoolbox EAI provides general introductions to EAI as well as news, discussion, standards and package reviews.

   • EAI Journal provides focused information on EAI, offering statistics, awards, feature articles and events to IT professionals.