EAI Technologies
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We can note that most large enterprises possess complex heterogeneous legacy systems developed in the past which were built with little thought given to the integration aspect.
This outdated architecture can seriously impact business performance. To succeed in today's business environment and respond quickly to challenges and opportunities, organizations need to link their disparate systems.
MIDASOFT offers a set of consulting services, from supporting your existing middleware solutions to assisting with new implementations, helping determine the best way to integrate new technologies into your enterprise. Only by using an efficient middleware system, enterprises can reduce operational costs and inefficiency.
What is Enterprise Application Integration?
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EAI is the process of creating an integrated infrastructure for linking disparate systems, applications, and data sources throughout the corporate enterprise; it is a concept that groups together a set of methods, technologies and tools used to consolidate and coordinate different applications, leading to the urbanization of the enterprise's information system.
Types of EAI
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EAI solutions can take different forms. The appropriate level of EAI can be depend on many factors including company size, business area, integration/project complexity, and budget.
The main types of EAI solutions are:
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Data integration occurs at the database and data source levels within an organization. The integration is achieved by migrating data from one data source to another. There is a lot of data replication and middleware tools to facilitate data transfer between data sources in both real-time and batch modes. Some data integration methods include:
- Batch Transfer
- Data Union
- Data Replication
- Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) Solution
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While data integration has proved a popular form of EAI, it can have problems from security, data integrity, and business process perspectives. The vast majority of data within an organization is accessed and maintained through business logic. The business logic applies and enforces the required business rules, processes and security for the underlying data.
Business process integration occurs at the business process level, which spans multiple applications. It is often characterized by the use of advanced middleware such as an integration broker, which standardizes and controls the flow of information through a bus or hub-and-spoke framework.
What is an Integration Broker?
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An integration broker, built primarily on message oriented middleware, provides an end-to-end integration platform addressing the critical business components required to completely automate business processes flowing across the extended enterprise, which also includes trading partners. It provides wide-range, pre-built application adapters, and bi-directional connectivity to CRM, ERP, mainframe applications and other.
An integration broker processes data coming from source nodes, transforms data, converts schemes, and routes the data to the target node. Here, the node can be an application, a program, or a person - as defined in the business process workflow. Communications between applications and an integration broker occurs mostly in the form of messages. An integration broker also provides a repository for archiving, searching, and retrieving messages.
Web services: another technology that enables EAI
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As companies move towards collaborative B2B e-commerce, they will first have to look inwards at their own internal systems, applications and processes. Several business processes span across multiple internal applications. These applications must be able to communicate dynamically in real-time before a company can effectively e-communicate with the outside world: this is where Web Services come into play.
Web services is a modular application that can be accessed by a network (Internet, intranet) through a standard XML format interface. The use of standard XML protocols makes the Web Services platform, language, and vendor independent an ideal candidate for use in EAI solutions.