Introduction
“enterprise application integration” is a catch-all for integrating applications within an organization. It’s sometimes also referred to as EAI, which stands for enterprise application integration. EAI aims to connect your various business systems so that they work together seamlessly—in other words so that another can share data from one application without being copied or duplicated.
What is Enterprise Application Integration?
Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is a way to integrate applications across an enterprise. It’s also a subset of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), which is an approach to designing and building more flexible, maintainable, reusable, and interoperable software systems.
In contrast to EAI, SOA provides standards for interconnecting various components within an organization or system. The purpose of EAI is to allow different applications to communicate with one another by defining the rules that must be followed during the integration process; this enables business users to access data from multiple sources without needing knowledge of how each application works separately.
EAI and Web Services
Web services are software applications or functions accessed over the internet using a standard protocol. They enable business partners to share information and work together without being physically present.
Web services use XML to encode data, which other systems send and receive in a standardized format. This ensures that all parties can access the same information from any web service regardless of location or operating system (OS).
You can use web services for many things, including:
- Connecting two different enterprise applications across an organization’s network
- Sharing information about products or services between departments within your organization
- Synchronizing file directories with FTP servers
EAI and SOA
EAI and SOA are two different things. EAI is a technology that allows applications to communicate with each other, while SOA is a concept that describes how an application should be built in the first place.
In simple terms, EAI is a way of connecting applications together, while SOA is a way of building applications.
While these concepts overlap somewhat, they can be used separately or together depending on your needs and requirements.
Why Integrate your Applications?
In an enterprise, using multiple applications leads to siloed data and processes. The integration allows companies to centralize their data and operations, creating a more efficient system that can be customized for each organization.
Integration can improve customer satisfaction by creating a streamlined process that eliminates redundant steps and saves time. For example: if you have an online store, you may have different systems for managing your inventory, order processing, and payment processing. These could all be integrated into one platform, so customers don’t have to jump between multiple websites or applications when they buy something from your company’s website. This also means fewer errors because there are fewer places where things can go wrong with each transaction and less training for employees who will interact with customers directly (such as in-store salespeople).
Integrating applications also improves employee satisfaction since it makes their jobs easier by ensuring everyone working on different aspects of your business has access to the same information—they don’t need separate logins for every application or database used within the organization! Integrating apps also reduces costs because there are fewer duplicated efforts across departments: no more worrying about whether someone else already entered that piece of data into another system; no more trying to find what happened last year before making decisions based on those records etcetera—your entire workforce gets access everything they need right away!
How to Integrate my apps?
Integration is the process of connecting two or more applications. Integration can be achieved using a service bus, a third-party integration platform, an API management platform, an EAI solution, or a toolkit.
Any company that has many applications and needs them to work together needs an EAI solution.
EAI is the technology that helps companies integrate their applications. It’s a solution for companies that need to integrate their applications and facilitates a data flow. EAI is used in many industries, including healthcare and financial services.
Conclusion
We hope this article has given you a better understanding of EAI and how it can help your business. If you are interested in learning more about the different types of Enterprise Application Integration available, please check out our other blog posts on this topic.
