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Most organisations have spent
millions of dollars buying and
deploying best-of-breed enterprise
applications to run various aspects
of their business. Additionally
organisations probably have "home
grown legacy" applications to
perform functions unique to their
business. Unfortunately, all these
systems are potentially
incompatible, and almost everything
a business does involves more than
one of these systems. The only way
to unlock the full value of those
systems is to integrate them so they
can seamlessly interact with each
other. Fortunately today there are
three mature and well regarded
technologies that can perform this
function each with a different
emphasis on the outcome we will
discuss two of these technologies in
this document, EAI and EII.
EAI software provides a common
framework for integrating
incompatible and distributed systems
making it faster and easier to tie
together applications and Web
Services so you can integrate them
into business processes that span
across your organisation. Typically
EAI reduces the complexity of your
IT infrastructure and dramatically
improves its reliability,
flexibility and scalability, giving
you the ability to focus on
improving how your business runs
instead of worrying about whether or
not your infrastructure will be
scalable or flexible enough to
support new initiatives or
capitalise on constant shifts in the
market.
EAI software lets your
applications, databases and
mainframes communicate and interact
with each other by automatically
routing and transforming information
so it gets where it needs to be,
when it needs to be there, and in
the proper format. EAI software lets
you integrate your business using
the best available approach for your
specific situation, whether that is
an industry-standard technology such
as Java, XML, or Web Services, or
Messaging software.
EII is a framework for real-time
integration of disparate data types
from multiple sources across and
beyond the boundaries of an
enterprise, providing a universal
data access layer, using
publish/subscribe technology or
on-demand capabilities. The final
destination for EII is a person, via
a dashboard or a report. If your
needs are for real time data
integration, then EII is the best
choice. EII creates virtual data
integration between various sources
of data that may be represented
through a UDM layer.
 EII is very useful when you need to
create a common, single access point
represented through one access
technology type or language to
disparate data sources. EII tools
typically provide more flexible,
occasional access to data for users
or applications without requiring a
permanent or long-term purpose. EII
tools are able to access XML, LDAP,
flat files and other non-relational
data in addition to traditional
relational database files and they
can publish data as XML, HTML or Web
services data. EII is particularly
focused on real-time data detail.
To maximise the use of EII an
organisation needs to have a
thorough understanding of the data
requirements for both strategic and
tactical decision making. An
organisation needs to recognise that
bringing these tools into their
overall architecture requires a
commitment from both business and IT
to develop a data and application
management strategy that creates a
reliable, ongoing provision of
real-time data. |
