As companies move in the direction of collaborative business-to-business e-commerce, 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 dynamically in real-time before a company can effectively e-communicate with the outside world. The need for IT systems to communicate within an organization led to the evolution of enterprise application integration (EAI) .EAI is the process of creating an integrated infrastructure for linking disparate systems, applications, and data sources across the corporate enterprise. The very origin of EAI solutions can be linked to the need for providing a full duplex, bi-directional solution to share seamlessly and exchange data between ERP, CRM, SCM, databases, data warehouses, and other important internal systems within the company. This integration provides the company with reduced costs; increased operational agility; reduced time to market; higher ROI, lower TCO and assured ROA. Application integration should include:-

1. Enabling automated front to back office integration, reducing risk / cost & increasing efficiency.
2. Post merger corporate systems integration, enabling early realization of business synergies.
3. Customer relationship management systems, facilitating customer intimacy.
4. Customer contact / product systems integration, decreasing time to market.
5. E-commerce to legacy systems integration, enabling access to the new age of Internet commerce.
6. Execute Management Information System / Decision Support System, improving business flexibility.
7. Knowledge Management, leveraging existing distributed organizational knowledge.
8. Design and Develop EAI interfaces, EAI Methodology.
9. Creation of Standards, Templates, Accelerator.
10. Customized Repository for interface tracking / reusability.
11. Design Deployment / Production Landscape.
12. Implement / Test Integration Interfaces.

Purposes of EAI
EAI can be used for different purposes:
Data (information) Integration: Ensuring that information in multiple systems is kept consistent. This is also known as EII (Enterprise Information Integration).
Process Integration: Linking business processes across applications.
Vendor independence: Extracting business policies or rules from applications and implementing them in the EAI system, so that even if one of the business applications is replaced with a different vendor's application, the business rules do not have to be re-implemented.
Common Facade: An EAI system could front-end a cluster of applications, providing a single consistent access interface to these applications and shielding users from having to learn to interact with different software packages.

In a nutshell, one can say that for companies to achieve success, they firstly have to take a look at their own internal functions and business processes.EAI is the solution for that.

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