Enterprise App Integration

An Enterprise Application Integration solution (EAI) is the process of linking different applications in order to realize operational and financial efficiencies. A solid business application integration strategy works to balance ease of integration with software and maintenance costs and allows the organization to focus most of its efforts on its value-creating core competencies instead of focusing on workflow management.

Great amounts enterprise data lies locked away in monolithic applications. Whether they be purchased, home-grown, or as a combination, the realities of business demand that the information contained in those vertical 'silos' be used in ways that the original architects never intended.
Enterprise Application Integration, or EAI, encompasses the following areas:

• Opening up ways for the information to flow from one application to another
• Letting applications to reach other sources of data outside themselves
• Allowing other programs to peer into the innards of formerly closed programs
• Sharing data between divisions or even between separate corporations

Examples of enterprise programs that can benefit from EAI include:

• Enterprise Resource Planning
• Customer Relationship Management
• Supply Chain Management
• Human Resources Management

Integrating and Distributing Systems and Resources
When a business cuts across country boundaries through expansion, acquisitions, and mergers, its IT infrastructure expands geographically. Interconnecting systems, resources, and applications among various business groups and partners then becomes imperative. Developmental efforts also become increasingly scattered, in line with outsourcing and offshore development strategies. All these integration issues can be effectively addressed only by means of distributing applications across the network, and probably across the globe.

Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA)
Services-oriented architecture and Web services-related technologies such as SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI are becoming increasingly popular in the international community, and the means of exploiting them are being debated seriously. Web services introduce lots of flexibility and adaptability and their strengths lie in exposing different disparate systems to each other by using common protocols, registries, and business interfaces to make collaborative computing a reality. SOA also enables a company to publish its core application features onto the World Wide Web for discovery, integration, and use of other business vendors and consumers.

Adopting SOA includes the challenges of real-time electronic transactions coupled with an intelligent and collaborative environment that pervades various systems, applications, and resources.

Need to Adopt Common Standards and Strategies
To collaborate, collect, and unify development efforts, enterprises need to adopt certain common IT strategies and a standard environment for developing and deploying applications. These standards should be flexible enough to suit the existing environment, and at the same time provide room for future development and expansion.

These strategies should specifically cover the following:

• Standard middleware architecture and technology that is most suitable for the existing organizational infrastructure
• Standard application development environments (IDE) for developing and deploying various applications
• Enterprise-wide data exchange models and data-warehouse standards
• Integration methodologies and migration paths for existing back-office applications
• Inter-organizational and external services.

Adoresoft
Adoresoft resources specialize in Integration Methodologies and Technologies. We have implemented several critical projects with our clients using various well known technologies such as WebMethods, Microsoft BizTalk, Tibco, Tivoli, Vitria, Mercator, IBM Websphere MQ, Crossworld, and SeeBeyond.