Enterprise Application Integration

New trends in Software Technology and the complexity of IT landscapes lead to an increasing demand for Enterprise wide Application Integration. New laws and regulations force companies to integrate their IT into larger systems. Many companies are facing the same situation: The market has changed, the competition is stronger, and pressure on costs is increasing. Given these general conditions, IT structures are changing as well. IT budgets in corporate groups and industrial and commercial enterprises are spend to optimize business processes, align business with IT together with focus on harmonization and consolidation of processes, applications and systems, and their effective operation. At the same time, provisions must be made for the future; decisions are shaped by the potential return on investment (ROI) and total cost of ownership (TCO).

CHALLENGES IN EIS INTEGRATION

EISs differ significantly, in terms of their level of technological support, administrative and technological restrictions, ability to integrate with other systems, and exposure to low-level system details, as follows:

1. Level of technological support — EISs vary greatly in their level of technological advancement. For example, there are vast differences in the support provided for transactions and security. Some EISs are rather primitive, and they may offer no support for transactional access. Or, if they do offer some support, it is limited in scope. Other EISs are more advanced in supporting a transaction and security infrastructure. They may allow transactional access to their resources. Or, they may support a two-phase commit protocol and distributed transactions, and thus be able to participate in transactions with other EISs.
2. Administrative and technological restrictions — Many EISs impose specific technology and administrative restrictions on their users. These EISs are legacy systems or applications that have been in existence for a long time and their usage requirements may be more rigidly structured. For example, in some legacy systems it may be difficult to create new user accounts. Other legacy systems are difficult to extend to support development of new applications. An enterprise with such a legacy system must adapt to its shortcomings, but still must find a means to integrate the legacy system with other systems and new Web based applications.
3. Ability to integrate with other systems — EISs also differ in terms of their application programming models and client APIs, which makes it difficult to integrate these different EISs. These differences exist because most EISs were developed using architectures and technologies that best suited a certain class of enterprise applications and were prevalent at the time the application was initially developed. In addition, these EISs were developed when integration and interoperability with other types of systems and EISs may not have been the primary design goal.
4. Exposure to low-level system details — Client APIs for these EISs may differ in the low level transaction and security management details they expose to application developers, and this makes it more complex to integrate EISs. The application developer must understand the programming details of the EIS’s low level client API to properly integrate with the EIS. For example, suppose an EIS defines its client API using a C library. The C library defines methods that client applications use to manage transactions and perform transactional access to the EIS. Such a library may even expose the distributed communication mechanisms between client applications and the EIS. The application developer now has the added task of understanding this C library—and the low-level mechanisms exposed through this API—to use the client API. This additional complexity increases the development effort in enterprise application integration.

WHAT WE CAN OFFER

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and Business to Business (B2B) Integration Services within our Software Integration practice. Our expertise is not limited to a single integration platform vendor; we offer integration services in world's top integration platforms Microsoft, IBM & others. Hence, whatever your integration needs may be, we will tailor a custom solution to best fulfill your requirements by choosing the best integration platform in terms of functionality, cost and support.

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