B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

4.1. Today's Enterprise
Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) 97
Today, an average Fortune 500 company may have 50 or more internal
business applications deployed in multiple countries, different platforms
and sometimes even on different versions of the same technology. Such
large enterprises have small enterprises within themselves in the form
of autonomous groups, with each one of them having its own technology,
business priorities and preferences.
The information technology environment in companies is extremely
dynamic as they adopt the latest and the best-of-breed software solutions
that can help them in beating the competition. However, no single
vendor can provide all these solutions. Again, the solution from each
vendor may have different hardware, platform and database requirements,
which results in the implementation of multiple physically separate
systems.
As companies move in the direction of B2Bi, they will first have to
look inward to their own internal systems, applications and processes.
Several business processes span across multiple internal applications.
These applications must be able to communicate before a company can
effectively e-communicate with the outside world.
4.2. What is EAI?
Most companies have inherited an environment of disparate legacy
systems, applications, processes and data sources that typically interact
by a maze of interconnections that are poorly documented and expensive
to maintain. Additional problems arise from market consolidation in the
digital age. Mergers and acquisitions of companies today can increase
the complexity of system integration exponentially.
As the need to meet increasing customer expectations continues to
rise, companies are forced to link their disparate systems to improve
productivity, efficiency, and, ultimately, customer satisfaction.
The need for IT systems to communicate within an organization led
to the evolution of EAI. EAI is the process of creating an integrated
infrastructure for linking disparate systems, applications and data sources
across the corporate enterprise.