What is Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)?

EAI is the ongoing process of putting an infrastructure in place, so that a logical environment is created that allows business people to easily deploy new or changing business processes that rely on IT.

Why Do We Need Integration?
Today's business applications rarely live in isolation. Users expect instant access to all business functions an enterprise can offer, regardless of which system the functionality may reside in. This requires disparate applications to be connected into a larger, integrated solution. This integration is usually achieved through the fusion of some form of middleware. Middleware provides the "plumbing" such as data transport, data transformation, and routing.

Business Process Consulting
First of all, to eliminate (or create?) already some of the confusion: EAI is not something you can buy. EAI is not a product. It is not some kind of development tool. It is even not a category of middleware. EAI is something you do. It is a way of increasing the business value of your IT environment. However, it is also true that it is an IT approach that typically will make use of various middleware products and technologies. Enterprise application integration (EAI) involves data collection, standardization and consolidation. It also requires relevant technologies such as warehouse, portal, wireless and web services applications as companies seek to become real time enterprises (RTE).

EAI is not a one-time exercise. In the initial phase, where the company evolves from its current IT application environment to an EAI-enabled infrastructure, many one-time changes will occur. But even when arriving at the "final" stage of integration, it will be mandatory that, whatever further changes in the IT environment occur (new systems, new technology, and changes to applications…), these are deployed in accordance to the EAI principles.

Infrastructure
The EAI process will result in the deployment of an infrastructure that implements (imposes) the principles of good application integration. Many organizations have implemented EAI-style solutions as a tactical approach to solve a specific problem. Such implementations will often be IT-driven and there is no harm to that. However, if your ambition is to work towards an EAI implementation such as the one discussed here, then "infrastructure" is a keyword. Consequently, such project must be business driven. Some pieces of this infrastructure will be very low-level technical, far away from the abstraction layer used by the business people. However, this abstraction layer will not be able to provide its functionality and business services if the underlying groundwork is not done correctly. Message queuing is one of these parts of the underlying infrastructure that we see as being an essential element.

Business People
Yes, IT people will probably not like this, but the business people are the ones who understand the business and they must be the ones that "build" business processes. No longer the complex exercises of translating business requirements into functional specifications, prototyping, RAD, etc. No, business people will simply do the "programming", be it that this programming will be quite a bit different from the one that is being used by the IT people who build the infrastructure.

This underscores our requirement that EAI must be a business driven exercise. Business people have to be involved from the beginning. This also implies that top-management must drive the exercise.

EAI Objectives
EAI is not the thing you want to do if you have a very stable business environment (unless somewhere as a tactical solution). EAI is difficult, complex, and expensive. Therefore, you only want to start such an exercise if the potential gains are in balance with the guaranteed pains. However, in today's business climate only very few companies will have the luxury of stability. In most industries, "change" is the name of the game. EAI brings the promise of being able to handle "change".

Business Processes
Business process is the final keyword of our EAI definition: the things you want to do so that your company can grow; the translation of business objectives into action. This is the world of business services. These services will be built as an assembly of business components. A component being the piece of business logic that can be freely (re-) used anywhere to change, complement or enhance a specific business process.

This assembly of new or changing business processes should only have to deal with this manipulation of well-defined business components, the definition of the flow of interaction and the association of business rules to it. All underlying infrastructure, including complete ERP solutions, should be masked. Very few solutions today already provide support for such level of abstraction. As business processes are key in EAI implementations, do have a serious look at your current business operations. Some integration exercises will be a lot easier if first some level of process re-engineering takes place.

Jaggy's Areas of Expertise

Scope, Consulting, Implementation, Customization and Training for EAI solutions

Integration across multiple technologies including ERP, Web, Telephony, Mobile and Palm devices, legacy systems etc.