Integration Technology Takes Center Stage

Overview of Integration Servers
Architectural Approaches To Integration
Further Considerations
EAI or B2Bi?
Taking the Next Steps

Integration has always been very much behind the scenes,all the programming and custom coding that's required whenever an organization needs to connect different systems to allow it to share information. But with the increasing need to tie disparate systems together, enterprise application integration (EAI) is now assuming a much higher profile. These days, integration is a prerequisite for the e-commerce and e-business initiatives many organizations are undertaking. It's also a business-critical concern for companies undergoing mergers and acquisitions that need to interconnect a wide array of heterogeneous information systems,and need to do it ASAP.

Sophisticated integration typically requires costly and time-consuming programming efforts,many of them one-off, custom jobs that are impossible to reuse. And as the number of systems grows, the integrations become more difficult and more costly to maintain. Many organizations find that the complexity of their IT infrastructures puts them at a disadvantage as they seek to implement new technologies to support specific initiatives,particularly e-business initiatives that require them to extend the functionality of their back-office systems to their customers.

Enter EAI,or, more precisely, the integration servers that enable EAI. In response to these challenges, integration-server vendors now offer a far simpler and more scalable way of bringing disparate systems together. These integration servers provide a platform for minimizing point-to-point custom integrations, promoting reusability in joining diverse systems. This coordination of disparate data sources and applications also enables the automation of business processes that span multiple systems, giving organizations greater ability to leverage their existing systems,including older, legacy systems.