Enterprise Application Integration

The State of Many Businesses Today: Application Chaos

Most companies use a number of different applications from different vendors to manage various portions of their business. These systems include supply chain management, customer relationship management, human resources as well as a number of customer facing applications such as order entry/fulfillment and customer service. To make this environment most effective it is usually required that information be exchanged between these systems but due to their different structure and technologies it is a nontrivial task. In many cases the interfaces between these systems is not ideal as it is either manual or unreliable. In some cases no data is exchanged causing ‘islands’ of data to be created. Many Organizations have found it a mammoth business challenge to keep up with aging applications built at different times, by different groups, with different ideas of how technology should support the business. Often, well-intentioned, innovate technical professionals conjure up complex, bolt-on, band-aid solutons to specific short-term problems, only to create a royal mess for the business to understand and interpret.

Companies everywhere are plagued by tangled networks of platforms, databases, transaction processors and varying types of data. These disparate applications, databases and technologies become increasingly hard to maintain as time passes, but it is even harder to get rid of them- they are essential to business operations.

Enterprise Application Integration(eAI): A Fix-all Business Solution

Enterprise Application Integration(eAI) is a strategic and competitive positioning business enabler that allows companies to dramatically change the way they do business. eAI is soon becoming the business technology back-bone integral to an Organization's business success. Organizations implemeting eAI strategy allows companies to address the 'disparate view' problem to address it holistically through a unified, collaborative business technology platform.