Solutions/EAI

• What is EAI?
• Why use EAI?
• Common EAI scenarios
• Benefits of EAI
• Microsoft Biztalk Server
• Commerce Gateway
• Helios-IT and EAI

What is EAI? 

Enterprise Application Integration or EAI is all about connecting applications and organisations by providing a solid and single platform to share business information (data interfaces) and business processes (workflow).

When sharing data an organisation has to overcome several challenges:

• Applications have different ways in how they import or export data.
• Newer applications favour the XML data formats but older applications can’t handle XML.
• Some applications use proprietary file formats which may not be recognised by other applications.
• Most applications can only create or read files that are located on a file system (network share) but a shared file system between the applications is not always available and therefore other communication protocols are necessary (FTP, HTTP, SOAP, …).
• The latest applications will send their data using web services which cannot be implemented in most of the current systems without major development.
• To ensure correctness of data there is a growing demand for using digital certificates which most business applications do not support.

An EAI-solution has an answer to all of the above challenges.

An EAI-solution acts as a post office that provides a translation service. An application only needs to communicate with the EAI-solution, it does not need to know where the receiver or sender of the information resides nor does it need to know what language the receiver or sender works in.

An EAI-solution eliminates the need to develop specific interfaces for each application.

Example: every application that has product information can send data to the EAI-solution using its own format (CSV, XML, …) and its own protocol (File, FTP, HTTP, …). The EAI-solution will then send that data to every other application that needs this data and will do so by translating (converting) the data format and using the correct protocol for each of the destination applications.

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Common EAI scenarios 

Following are only some of the few scenarios where implementation of an EAI-solution is the best choice.

1. Data sharing

In today’s dynamic and demanding business environments it is very common that an organisation uses multiple applications to manage its day-to-day business. It is also very common that these applications are using the same kind of data; customers, products, ship-to addresses and so on are used in ERP as well as in CRM, Inventory management Field Service and so on.

EAI enables all these applications to share that data or business information between each other without the need to develop an interface between each of the applications.

2. Business process sharing

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