Enterprise application integration

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is defined as the uses of software and computer systems architectural principles to integrate a set of enterprise computer applications.

Many medium-size and large corporations use a variety of computer applications for managing data, including supply chain management applications (for managing inventory and shipping), customer relationship management applications (for managing current and potential customers), business intelligence applications (for managing internal operations), and other types of applications (for managing data such as human resources data, internal communications, etc). Unfortunately, such applications typically cannot communicate with one another in order to share data or business rules; for this reason, such applications are sometimes referred to as islands of automation or information silos. This lack of communication leads to inefficiency, in the form of the same data having to be stored in multiple locations, or straightforward processes that are unable to be automated.

Enterprise application integration (EAI) is the process of linking such applications within a single organization together in order to simplify and automate business processes to the greatest extent possible, while at the same time avoiding having to make sweeping changes to the existing applications or data structures. In the words of the Gartner Group, EAI is the “unrestricted sharing of data and business processes among any connected application or data sources in the enterprise.”[1]

One large challenge of EAI is that the various systems that need to be linked together often reside on different operating systems, use different database solutions and different computer languages, and in some cases are legacy systems that are no longer supported by the vendor who originally created them. In some cases, such systems are dubbed "stovepipe systems" because they consist of components that have been jammed together in a way that makes it very hard to modify them in any way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_application_integration