Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) - Guide to Cloud Computing for Business and Technology Managers - page 89

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Enterprise A pplication Integration (EAI)
In these times of market change and turbulence, enterprises are confronted
with the increasing need to interconnect disparate systems to satisfy the
need of the business. It is estimated that 35%-60% of an organization's IT
resources are spent on integration. Enterprise application integration is the
creation, maintenance, and enhancement of leading-edge competitive func-
tionality of the enterprise's business solutions by combining the function-
ality of the existing legacy applications, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS)
software packages, and newly developed custom applications via a common
middleware.
4.1 Enterprise Applications
Enterprise applications are software applications developed to manage the
business operations, assets, and resources of an enterprise. Their devel-
opment process integrates the work of at least four groups, namely, GUI
developers responsible for the design and development of widgets to ease
human computer interaction; application programmers focusing on coding
the business logic for the solution of a particular business problem; data-
base managers building data models to structure and manage data stor-
age, access, security, and consistency; and finally, application integrators for
integrating existing applications and available technologies with the new
applications.
In principle, there is no difference between enterprise applications and
regular software applications other than the specific business purpose
they are developed for. As the nature of business goals and processes vary,
software solutions delivered for specific business problems vary as well.
As a consequence, the number and the variety of applications delivered for
each solution increase the complexity of managing the overall IT system.
While having an automated solution to business problems increases effec-
tiveness and efficiency and reduces cost, managing the complexity of the
automation solution is a new business problem that companies have to
deal with.
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