Innovatech

In today’s competitive and dynamic business environment, applications such as Supply Chain Management, Customer Relationship Management, Business Intelligence and Integrated Collaboration environments have become imperative for organizations that need to maintain their competitive advantage. Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is the process of linking these applications and others in order to realize financial and operational competitive advantages.

One of the challenges facing modern organizations is giving all their workers complete, transparent and real-time access to information. Many of the legacy applications still in use today were developed using arcane and proprietary technologies, thus creating information silos across departmental lines within organizations. These systems did not enable seamless movement of information from one application to the other. EAI, as a discipline, aims to alleviate many of these problems, as well as create new paradigms for truly lean proactive organizations.

EAI intends to transcend the simple goal of linking applications, and attempts to enable new and innovative ways of leveraging organizational knowledge to create further competitive advantages for the enterprise.

When different systems can’t share their data effectively, they create information bottlenecks that require human intervention in the form of decision making or data entry. With a properly deployed EAI architecture, organizations are able to focus most of their efforts on their value creating core competencies instead of focusing on workflow management.

Improving connectivity

Enterprise Application Integration has increased in importance because enterprise computing often takes the form of islands of automation. This occurs when the value of individual systems are not maximized due to partial or full isolation. If integration is applied without following a structured EAI approach, point-to-point connections grow across an organization. Dependencies are added on an impromptu basis, resulting in a tangled mess that is difficult to maintain. This is commonly referred to as spaghetti, an allusion to the programming equivalent of spaghetti code. For example:

The number of n connections needed to have a fully-meshed point-to-point connections is given by n(n-1) / 2 Thus, for 10 applications to be fully integrated point-to-point, (10)(9) / 2 or 45 point-to-point connections are needed.

However, EAI is not just about sharing data between applications; it focuses on sharing both business data and business process. Attending to EAI involves looking at the system of systems, which involves large scale inter-disciplinary problems with multiple, heterogeneous, distributed systems that are embedded in networks at multiple levels

Purposes of EAI

EAI can be used to for different purposes:

Data (information) integration: ensuring that information in multiple systems is kept consistent. This is also known as EII.

Process integration: linking business processes across applications.

Vendor independence: extracting business policies or rules from applications and implementing them in the EAI system, so that even if one of the business applications is replaced with a different vendor's application, the business rules do not have to be re-implemented.

Common facade: An EAI system could front-end a cluster of applications, providing a single consistent access interface to these applications and shielding users from having to learn to interact with different applications.

TIBCO Enterprise Application Integration

If you are like most business leaders, you've probably spent millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours buying and deploying best-of-breed enterprise applications to run various aspects of your business. And you've probably spent nearly as much time developing and maintaining "home grown" applications to perform functions unique to your business. Unfortunately, these systems are inherently incompatible, and almost everything your business does involves more than one of them. The only way to unlock the full value of those systems is to integrate them so they can seamlessly interact with each other.

Enterprise application integration (EAI) software provides a common framework for integrating incompatible and distributed systems - making it faster and easier to tie together applications and Web Services so you can integrate them into business processes that span your organization. EAI reduces the complexity of your IT infrastructure and dramatically improves its reliability, flexibility and scalability - giving you the ability to focus on improving how your business runs instead of worrying about whether or not your infrastructure will be scalable or flexible enough to support new initiatives or capitalize on perpetual shifts in the market.

TIBCO's EAI software lets your applications, databases and mainframes communicate and interact with each other by automatically routing and transforming information so it gets where it needs to be, when it needs to be there, and in the proper format. TIBCO's EAI software lets you integrate your business using the best available approach for your specific situation - whether that is an industry-standard technology such as Java, XML, or Web Services, or TIBCO's own messaging software.

TIBCO's EAI Products