Enterprise application integration (EAI) entails integrating applications and enterprise data sources so that they can easily share business processes and data. Integrating the applications and data sources must be accomplished without requiring significant changes to these existing applications and the data.

Before EAI, integrating applications and data within a corporate environment has been an expensive and risky proposition. As we noted previously, companies were trying to combine applications that often ran on different hardware platforms and had no protocols for communicating with other software packages outside of their own narrowly defined realm. In a sense, companies had “islands” of business functions and data, and each island existed in its own, separate problem domain.

How did an enterprise try to fix this situation? The company would bring in a team of consultants and embark on a long and expensive process of determining the feasibility of integrating their systems, designing the integration approach, and finally developing and implementing the procedures (both manual and computerized) to achieve the integration.

IbleSoft implement different approaches to achieving enterprise application integration.

We have identified five approaches that we feel are typically used to integrate existing enterprise information systems with enterprise applications. These are:

•  Using a two-tier client-server approach
•  Using synchronous adapters
•  Using asynchronous adapters
•  Using a message broker approach
•  Using an application server-based approach