Enterprise Application Integration 101

[From iSource Business, August/September 2002] What Is EAI, Really?

The first problem with EAI, says Kimberly Knickle, a research director at technology consultancy AMR Research, is defining what it is. "Enterprise application integration means different things to different people - and to different suppliers, of course."

At the most basic level, EAI refers to the process of connecting different applications to allow information to flow (by Knickle's definition) between functions within an enterprise or (by a more expansive definition) between trading partners. Bear in mind: EAI is different from middleware, the actual software that connects applications. "It's not just moving data from one place to another," Knickle explains.

Rather, it's the process of taking data that has been taken from databases, applications and portal sites, transforming the data so that a target application can understand it, routing the data based on the content if necessary and perhaps ensuring that the data conform to a particular business process. For example, EAI in support of an order-to-cash process might involve the requisite connections to let a sales rep take the order, verify that the stock is in inventory, check the customer's credit, and verify that the customer is authorized for the amount of the purchase or route the order for approvals if necessary.

Knickle talks about an "EAI framework" that includes components to handle the data movement, data transformation and business process aspects; the specific adapters that provide access to the information residing in particular applications or other data sources; and perhaps an overlying application that allows a company to manage integration as one system rather than trying to administer bits and pieces of middleware scattered about the enterprise's IT infrastructure.

Why Is EAI Important?

Reflecting on this question, Glenn MacKenzie, director of the manufacturing business unit at integration solution specialist webMethods, points to the evolution that he has seen over the past four or five years in who within the enterprise thinks EAI is important. "It went from the techies in the backroom who wanted to learn Java," MacKenzie says, "to IT department heads who were forced to slash budgets and needed to find ways to automate things that were done manually; to chief information officers who were again looking to cut costs and automate business processes; to now, with corporate executives on a functional level looking at how integration is a critical component in improving their key performance indicators (KPIs)."

CIOs certainly do have integration on their minds, according to regular surveys of the top information executives by Morgan Stanley. EAI has consistently ranked as a priority spending area for IT organizations in the survey over the past year. Jon Derome, program manager for business applications and commerce at technology research firm Yankee Group, says the slow economy has been at least partly behind this trend. "Companies have invested in lots of different applications, either packaged or developed in-house," he explains. "Now that the market has tightened, companies are not as willing to make capital outlays for new applications. Instead, companies are investing in integration technologies to tie together the various application assets they've accumulated over time."

Such internally-focused projects have the benefit of keeping IT staff employed at a time when new technology projects have been put on hold, but EAI inside the enterprise can also produce real efficiency gains, according to Derome. EAI's efficiency-related benefits derive from its role in process automation, the ability to link otherwise isolated applications in such a way that routine processes previously conducted by humans through phone, fax, e-mail or "sneaker-ware" - such as checking inventories or sending advance shipping notices - can be performed instantaneously and automatically by computers. In theory, then, EAI promises the same benefits that have become the boilerplate of e-business press releases, such as reduced errors, faster response times to queries and alerts to supply chain bottlenecks.