This document provides an overview of enterprise application integration (EAI), including definitions, objectives, components, advantages, and examples. EAI involves integrating independently developed applications that may use different technologies. It has become a priority for many companies and is expected to be a $50 billion market by 2001. Key components of EAI solutions include business rule/logic modules, data acquisition interfaces/adapters, development tools, message brokers, and system control/management tools. Examples demonstrate how EAI can integrate e-commerce sites with legacy systems to share order and customer data.

1. ENTERPRISE
APPLICATION
INTEGRATION
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2. OBJECTIVES
ODS Overview
EAI concepts
EAI functional components
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3. DEFINITIONS
Enterprise Application Integration
 Definition: The process of integrating multiple applications that were
independently developed, may use incompatible technology, and remain
independently managed.
 By this definition, EAI would include:
 Business Process Integration
 Enterprise Information Integration

4. ENTERPRISE APPLICATION INTEGRATION
Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is one of the hot-
button issues in Information Technology in 2000.
Information Week's research survey of 300 technology
managers showed nearly 75% of respondents said EAI is a
planned project for their IT departments in the coming year.
According to a study by Bank Boston, the market for EAI is
expected to be $50 Billion USD in 2001
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5. ENTERPRISE APPLICATION INTEGRATION
EAI began at Goldman Sachs in New York nearly 10 years ago,
where they funded the Teknekron Information Bus (TIB) to
pump stock market quotes into different systems.
The programmers who wrote Teknekron then left and founded
TIBCO.
Many of those same developers are now with Vitria.
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6. ENTERPRISE APPLICATION INTEGRATION (EAI)
Provides the means to share data between different
applications without writing custom interfaces.
Example:
 Consider a company that wants to do build an eCommerce portal.
 Has a number of legacy applications (or even an ERP solution in place)
 Need build the web-based eCommerce infrastructure and link with
systems that do functions like process orders, manage inventory, ship
products
 The company decides to use a major courier service for delivery of
products ordered from the web site.
 The company wants an ODS for analysis of transactions taking place
on the site
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7. EXAMPLE
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eCom
Site
Courier
Shipping
Inventory
Order
System
ODSEAI
Alternative – employ EAI solution

8. ADVANTAGES OF EAI
Cost effectiveness
Time to market
Scalability
Ability to deal with complex environments
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9. EAI COMPONENTS
Business Rule Component: to allow the applications to understand your
business processes
Business Logic Modules (i.e. supply planning, sales order processing.
Methods for business process management.)
Transformation tools (to define how to map data from one system to
another)
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10. EAI COMPONENTS
Data Acquisition Component: to allow access to the data Data Source
and Target Interfaces (i.e. Siebel, SAP, PeopleSoft, ODBC, Oracle,
CICS, IMS) - note that the data acquisition component is crucial to
EAI success. Most vendors refer to these interfaces as "adapters"
Adapters understand the data structures associated with applications
and the means by which to access the data. (SAP/ABAP)
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11. EAI COMPONENTS
System Development Component: to allow programmers to design and
test custom requirements - Design tools (for business process
design, debugging, and testing)
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12. EAI - COMPONENTS
System Control Component: Should have the following features:
 Management tools (for application-specific monitoring)
 Directory tools (for locating other applications on different platforms), particularly support
for the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)
 Commitment control management mechanisms (for control of business-level logical units
of work)
 Strong support for metadata management
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13. EAI - COMPONENTS
 Message Brokers (to control transactions, control security, and perform event
notification. The product should also include the capability to "bridge" messages
between different messaging systems
 Scalability for high-volume transaction throughput. It is almost impossible to know at
implementation time what the data volumes will be in the future – therefore, EAI must be
scalable.
 Support for varying levels of fault tolerance, load balancing, and failover for mission-
critical systems
 Workflow enablement is a key requirement to reduce latency between distributed
processes.
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14. EXAMPLE
Save for Later (Computer Maker’s Web Store)
 Potential client goes to the web site and registers
 Client then browses through products, placing in ‘shopping cart’.
 If client decides not to buy at a point in time, can ‘Save For Later’ – keep the order
for a period and come back later to purchase.
Once a SFL transaction takes place, the computer maker routes to an
ODS, does some analysis.
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15. EXAMPLE
SFL data may be used in a variety of ways
 Customer may be sent an email
 Transactions may be routed to call center for follow up (with customer registration data –
email, phone, etc) – offer discounts, product information, etc. – try to convince the
customer to purchase.
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16. EXAMPLE
How it works:
 Save for later transaction on the web causes INSERT or UPDATE in certain DB
tables
 Trigger fires after INSERT or UPDATE and routes data to EAI queue.
 EAI software reads the data in the queue does some simple transformations
(mapping of data in this case) and forwards to ODS based on a set of rules (some
transactions are ignored, for example)
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