Enterprise Application Integration (EAI): Comprehensive Guide for Management

Enterprise Application Integration (often abbreviated to EAI) is a process-oriented approach to integrating enterprise applications. It enables the management of the complexity of heterogeneous application systems, avoids data redundancy, and optimizes business processes to achieve increased flexibility and reduce costs. Ultimately, Enterprise Application Integration helps fully exploit the hidden synergy potential of existing systems.

This blog post explains the benefits of EAI, the integration approaches available, and how enterprise applications can be integrated.

The Most Important Advantages at a Glance:

Because integration involves high risks and effort, companies are still hesitant when it comes to integration projects. On the other hand, however, the benefits can justify the necessary effort and seem quite compelling. What companies gain from enterprise application integration:

• 360-degree view of business processes

Enterprise Application Integration enables participants to gain a comprehensive overview of various aspects along the value chain. Be it customer management, supply chain management, asset management and others.

By integrating data from multiple customer touchpoints (touchpoints between companies and customers along the entire customer journey such as customer portals, websites, social media channels, physical branches/stores/offices or even employees), your company can gain a comprehensive picture of customer interactions and offer tailored loyalty programs.

Integrating order management software with customer service software development provides an opportunity to gain an overview of all customer orders and status information, thereby improving customer service and support. Supply chain management enables unified access to consolidated information from various sources, such as accounting and inventory management software and a supplier portal , which significantly contributes to the development of a long-term strategy.

• Optimized business processes

Enterprise Application Integration not only integrates different IT landscapes but also links the associated business processes. Regardless of whether standard or customized software , new or legacy systems, or external or internal data sources are involved, it is possible to map all business processes, make them more transparent, standardize them where necessary, and optimize them as a result. For example, by connecting inventory and supplier management software, a company can replenish stocks more accurately or manage sales more efficiently to meet increasing demand with supply.

• Ease of use

Since constantly switching between application systems is not only impractical but also time-consuming, Enterprise Application Integration makes it possible to avoid duplication of effort and the associated errors. For example, connecting CRM and DMS solutions can simplify the lives of sales teams, increase efficiency, and improve sales and marketing activities. Since a CRM system is the primary tool for processing and managing customer or prospect data, integration makes it possible to gain quick access to relevant information (terms, scope of services, collaboration models).

• More opportunities to use modern technologies

Enterprise application integration enables the integration of modern technologies such as IoT, data analytics, and AI-based tools into business processes. By consolidating cross-company data and ensuring its consistency, it offers more diverse possibilities for training machine learning algorithms.

What levels of integration are there?

Depending on the level of enterprise application integration required in your project and your requirements, there are four types of integration: data integration, functional integration, presentation integration, and business process integration. To determine what your company needs, we suggest answering the following questions:

Do you want unified access to consistent data from multiple applications?

• Data integration enables the sharing of data from different data sources, centrally stored in a data repository, and presented in a uniform format to avoid redundancies and ensure data consistency across the entire organization. Diverse applications function independently of one another. Data from other apps can be reused if necessary.

Do you want functions that perform certain common tasks and are available in different systems to be available only through a third-party application?

• This is called function integration , which enables access to the business logic of other applications or legacy software. This means that a function call in one application causes corresponding calls in other applications, allowing relevant operations to be performed. This helps avoid duplicate functions, simplify updates, and reduce the cost of developing new apps.

Do you want to create a new business process while reusing the logic of existing applications?

• Business process integration can help with this . Creating a new distributed business process allows you to leverage your existing application code in a new way. A separate integration management component (also known as a choreographer) can coordinate the work of a modeled workflow. Coordination occurs through the linking of various programs responsible for individual steps along a business process. For example, by integrating supplier inventory management software, shipping provider portals, or their own warehouse management software, retailers can provide their customers with enhanced information about shipping conditions and order status. This type of integration greatly increases the value of existing investments and reduces the costs of app development and maintenance.

Do you want to access multiple applications through a unified user interface to avoid switching between different screens?

• This is possible with display integration . This type of integration provides the simplest and fastest way to organize communication between different applications using display logic and present these applications through a unified interface, which contributes enormously to work optimization and error reduction.
• The chosen integration level will serve as the basis for deciding which architecture, integration methods and approaches will be used in the creation of your future integration solution.

Integration methods and approaches in EAI: Advantages and limitations at a glance

While we don’t aim to cover all existing methods, we would like to take a closer look at three of the most popular approaches to building integration solutions: a legacy shared database, a widely discussed service-oriented architecture (SOA), and an increasingly popular robotic process automation (RPA).

Shared database:

The oldest option is to integrate multiple applications by implementing a common database. In this scenario, multiple applications use the same data from a shared database, which is also converted into a uniform data format.

Advantages:

• Exceptional data consistency : All data changes are available immediately.
• Relatively fast response time : There are no additional abstraction layers (interfaces) used to transfer data.

Restrictions:

• Single point of failure : The failure of the shared database results in the failure (partial or complete) of all connected applications.
• Complex database changes : To make the necessary changes, all applications connected through the shared database must be harmonized.
• Increased security risks : External solutions have direct access to the stored data.
• No integration with finished products: Every platform-based solution such as SAP, ERP or Salesforce CRM has its own databases and cannot be integrated in this way.

Service-oriented architecture (SOA)

The promising SOA-based approach enables the creation of an adaptable architecture in which all processes and applications are linked using independent, agile, and reusable web services. This type of architecture is business process oriented and supports distributed data processing, which also explains why service-oriented architecture is used in enterprise application integration. Because all applications are integrated into this type of architecture, it enables companies to respond to changes in ongoing processes in near real time, increasing agility.

Although this approach is becoming increasingly attractive, each company must decide which business processes and applications need to be broken down into reusable components. It’s important to note that service oriented architecture enables both easier changes to existing services and rapid introduction of new ones.

If your organization chooses SOA-based integration, there are two common implementation methods to choose from : point-to-point connection and Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).

Point-to-point connection

This connection variant enables direct communication between services.

Advantages:

• These connections can be created relatively quickly and easily this is suitable for cases where only a few services need to be coordinated.

Restrictions:

• Increasing complexity – The increasing number of connections required to integrate new systems leads to an increasing number of interfaces and increasing complexity. This suggests that, for a large number of applications (which is common in companies today), the connection should be designed in the form of a hub.
• Increased effort for changes and integration of new services – Because services are closely linked, the interfaces of all already integrated components with which a new component to be integrated will communicate must be adapted. This takes a lot of time, resulting in longer changes and increased susceptibility to disruption.
• Complex and costly maintenance – As the number of integrated services and the interfaces required to connect them increases, so does the maintenance effort. Therefore, using point-to-point integration, it is difficult to design and maintain complex systems and landscapes with 20, 100, or more integrated services.
  Point-to-point connection

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)

An Enterprise Service Bus, as a central component of service-oriented architecture, represents an intermediary that assumes overall responsibility for communication between services and applications, enables the integration of distributed services, and handles the processing and forwarding of messages according to predefined rules, process orchestration, and security management. Special adapters enable applications to communicate with the Enterprise Service Bus to transform messages from one format to another.

The costs of ESB implementation vary widely. If a free, open-source ESB solution is used, companies must consider support costs (these vary depending on whether support activities are handled internally or outsourced to an external support provider ). Another option is to use commercial ESB solutions.

Advantages:

• Congestion resilience – Since messages are independent of the respective recipient, load balancing is enabled and failover is ensured.
• Increased security – Typically, mechanisms such as authentication and authorization, encryption, and tokenization are built into the ESB solution to protect services from unauthorized access.
• Faster updates and scaling – You don’t need to rewrite all APIs. Only the adapter of the changed service needs to be updated.
• Legacy software integration – The legacy solution is unable to communicate with modern protocols such as REST or SOAP. This type of integration requires no changes to the legacy applications because an ESB acts as an interpreter to ensure seamless communication.

Restrictions:

• Single point of failure – Similar to a shared database, the failure of an ESB can paralyze the entire IT structure of the company.
• Lower performance – Due to an increased number of intermediate components (adapter, router, choreographer, etc.).
• Middleware license costs – These can be higher for complex systems .

Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Software robots based on robotic process automation can mimic human interactions and perform repetitive tasks: entering data, clicking, copying, and transferring data from one application to another, which allows for the automation of routine manual processes and the reduction of errors.

Advantages:

• No interruptions to ongoing business processes – because no programming or changes to existing applications are required.
• No APIs required – Integration occurs at the user interface level, eliminating the need for complex programming of application programming interfaces (APIs).
• Fast implementation – An RPA solution can be implemented within a few weeks.
• Fast ROI – Case studies on robotic process automation show that the return on investment (ROI) is 30% to 200% in the first year after implementation .

Restrictions:

• Reduced flexibility – When switching between systems frequently, software robots may lack flexibility. The same problem arises when something unplanned (i.e., “wrong”) goes wrong, automated processes are changed, or bottlenecks occur, which can cause the technology to malfunction.
• Limited use cases – RPA may only be well-suited for performing simpler, standardized tasks where no complex decisions need to be made.

Combination of several approaches : an example

It’s rare for a single EAI approach to be used in a complex enterprise environment. Typically, companies use a combination of multiple integration methods. For example, certain shipping services, such as shipping notification or tracking, can communicate directly with each other through a point-to-point connection. As services from a shipping management module, they have a common interface through which (thanks to the ESB solution) requests from other systems/modules (order processing, customer service) can be received and responded to.

Potential risks of EAI

Enterprise application integration also comes with some risks that must be considered from the outset. Before your company makes a decision, we’d like to draw your attention to three potential risks and their possible causes:

• Data quality can suffer during integration.

The reasons for this can be very diverse: incompatibility of data stored in different formats; transfer of faulty data from one system to another; integration of duplicate data; data can be lost, deleted or corrupted when traveling between different layers or applications, etc. If your company relies on poor quality data, it leads to incorrect decisions and actions.

To avoid this, we recommend checking data quality (as well as the quality of sources) according to recognized data quality criteria before integration using reliable tools and procedures; taking necessary measures to cleanse data; using appropriate mechanisms for data validation and transformation; storing the resulting data in a structured manner and in defined formats; and correcting incorrect or incomplete data.

• Integration can create security risks.

Integration into a system makes information easier to find. But this is precisely where a risk arises: direct and often uncontrolled access to resources creates security-related issues. Furthermore, integration often involves remote communication over the network, which also poses serious data protection and security risks.

To avoid this risk, we recommend being careful when assigning access rights, controlling and monitoring access; using proven authentication and authorization protocols; creating security policies, and considering additional encryption mechanisms.

• Mistakes can happen to anyone – integration is no exception.

Software testing is essential to ensure smooth enterprise application integration. Application integration presents a wide range of opportunities for errors to creep in: creating new connections, decoupling processes and structures, interactions between various components, lack of synchronization, different interface descriptions, inheritance of errors from legacy systems, and much more.

To overcome these challenges , you should engage a professional testing team with experience in integration projects with required testing, who has good knowledge of integration methodologies and middleware for enterprise applications and has a deep understanding of different integration levels and architectures.

And to summarize what needs to be considered with the EAI

Enterprise Application Integration provides a practical way for companies to manage the complexity of their IT landscapes, ensure data consistency, simplify data exchange, and, as a result, optimize business processes. To successfully implement the integration project, we recommend breaking it down into individual steps:

• First, clearly define what goals your company wants to achieve through enterprise application integration.
• Decide which applications should be integrated.
• Determine at which level you want to integrate your applications.
• Choose which integration approaches and communication models are best suited to your needs.
• Consider potential risks from the outset in order to take appropriate measures in a timely manner.