In early days, people have created different applications to accomplish their business need. Those applications used to use different technologies and platform. i.e. SAP for HRMS solution, Seibel for CRM activities, different legacy database to store application information, LDAP to store single sign on information and so on.

Over a period of time, the need for sharing information from one application to another was observed. To synchronize the information, various different methods were used. For instance:

• Synchronization of weekly data through flat files.
• Usage of common libraries files, which were included in the application to synchronize the data.

Problem

1. There were no common methods used that share information in real time among different system.
2. It was not secure and safe
3. Applications were tightly coupled with each other.
4. Maintenance cost was high.

As a resolution to all above states problem, Enterprise Application Interface (EAI was introduced.

EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) is a middleware technology that EAI provides. It is a medium for systems to talk and act together and use their common feature to each other. 

 

Using EAI you can integrate:

• Legacy / Mainframe system.
• Client-Server application
• Web application
• e-Commerce
• ERP / CRM / HRMS applicationn
• Custom application

Advantage of EAI:

• Real-time
• Integrate and Connect between systems
• Secure and Scalable
• Lower Total Cost of Ownership
  • Lesser development and support cost
  • Faster Build

EAI functionalities:

• Messaging (Message Producers/Consumers)
  • One Producer - One Consumer :Point to Point
  • One Producer - Multiple Consumers Topic
• Interfacing - Adapters
• Data Transformation
• Routing of messages
• Business Process Modeling
• Administration of the Infrastructure

Popular EAI tools:

• Tibco
• webMethods
• SeeBeyond
• Gentron