International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 8887)

Volume 42 No.7, March 2012

42

Challenges and Future of Enterprise Application
Integration

Tariq Rahim Soomro
College of Engineering & IT
Al Ain University of Science &
Technology, Al Ain, UAE

Abrar Hasnain Awan
Department of Information
Technology, SZABIST Dubai
Campus, UAE



ABSTRACT
In todays rapid growing business world, organizations are
relying on technology and need of the integration of the
disparate applications is in high demand. Enterprise
Application Integration (EAI) is use of hardware and software
to integrate a set of Enterprise Computer Applications. This
paper will review the types of EAI along-with its architecture.
Challenges in the field of EAI will be discussed later and
finally future of EAI will be discussed.
Keywords
EAI, Challenges of EAI, Future of EAI and ESB.
1. INTRODUCTION
Today the organizations heavily rely on the technologies
which are of different nature and the applications running in
different business units based on different technologies. So
the integration of these applications into a unified set of
business process has emerged as a priority. Enterprise
Application Integration (EAI) provides a mechanism to share
both processes and data. In the competitive business
environment to shorten the application development life cycle
and to reduce the financial cost the reuse of existing database
and application is a first choice instead of recreation. The
organization systems are based on new and old technologies
and use the broad range of platforms, databases and
application, and based on different programming languages.
Forester Research estimates that up to 35 percent of
development time and 30 percent of development cost is spent
to creating interfaces and points of integration for applications
and data sources. Therefore, the solution is the EAI; as it is
the collection of technologies and approaches to provide
short-term and cost-effective solution. It is a technology-
business philosophy where all enterprise systems can share
information and logic in easiest way. Using EAI applications
share data and process without changing the applications and
their data structures which is cost effective [1]. According to
[2] EAI is the combination of processes, software, standards,
and hardware resulting in the seamless integration of two or
more enterprise systems allowing them to operate as one.
EAI is the solution for the applications developed without
central vision or strategy and served a single purpose. The
applications can be for example, inventory control, sales
automation, general ledger, and human resource. The
applications are built for the specific need and based on the
technology-of-the-day, built on non-standard approach and
can-not interoperate. The old applications can be replaced
with the application based on latest technologies but adds
additional financial overhead to the organization [1].
Following are few advantages of EAI [3][4]:
It helps to access the real time information among
the applications
It simplifies the business process to improve the
efficiency of the enterprise
It provides the integrity of the information
It provides the easy development and maintenance
It improves the customer relationships
It improves the supply chain relationship
It keeps legacy applications alive
It improves the business process and time to market
is reduced
It supports the business and organizational changes
in some extent
It brings the standard approach in applications
It brings responsive technology to changing
business needs
It reshapes the applications according to current and
future business needs
This paper organized as follows, section 2 will review types
of EAI; section 3 will review its architecture; section 4 will
review the challenges and problems of EAI and final section
will discuss EAI along-with future work in the field of EAI.
2. TYPES OF EAI
The Enterprise Application Integration can be performed on
different levels as following and shown in Figure-1 bellow
[1]:
Data level
Application Interface level
Method level
User Interface level
International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 8887)
Volume 42 No.7, March 2012
43
2.1 Data-level EAI
Data-level EAI is related to the data integration, this technique
is used in typical EAI-enabled enterprise. The data is moved
from one data store to another and processes the information
if required. The main advantage of this approach is that there
is no code change which saves the cost of redevelopment [1].

Fig 1: Types of EAI [1]
2.2 Application Interface-level EAI
The business process and data is accessed through the
interfaces with this approach. The applications can be
bundled together and share the business logic and data but the
application interfaces have specific features and functions.
This approach is mostly used with the packaged applications.
Message brokers are used here as preferred alternative
solution [1].
2.3 Method-level EAI
Method-level EAI shares the business logic. A method can be
access by many applications and applications can access each
others method. It can be achieved in many ways, including
distributed objects, application servers, TP (transaction
processing) monitors, frameworks, and reusing the existing
applications for creating new application. This approach is
being used for long period as we reuse the business logic to
reduce the development efforts. But this approach is not very
effective due to technological and human constraints, and also
due to the different needs of the problem domain [1].
2.4 User Interface-level EAI
This approach bundles the applications use their user
interfaces. The mainframe applications can be accessed
through this approach. This is not a preferred approach but is
being used for years [1].
3. EAI ARCHITECTURES
EAI can also be categorized according to its design structure.
Following are known architectures of EAI [5]:
Point-to-Point topology
Hub-Spoke topology
Bus Topology
3.1 Point-to-Point Topology
Point-to-Point (P2P) considered as a traditional integration
approach. It allows one application to connect to one
application using a pipe. An application communicates with
its pair using a procedure call or message. A connector is
implemented for each pair of applications to communicate.
The connector is responsible for the data transformation and
integration for specific pair. It is possible to connect more
than two applications but it involves too many complexities.
This model is suitable for small organizations where few
applications are integrated; it can be easily build and deploy
for the customized needs for small infrastructure and if the
number of applications increased, the connections are
exponentially increased [1][6][7].
3.2 Hub-Spoke Topology
Hub-Spoke integration topology has centralized broker (Hub)
and adapters (Spoke). Spoke is a connector which connects
the application to the Hub. It translates the data for
application and Hub to communicate. It transforms, translates
and routes the messages for the destination. Adapter
publishes messages to the message broker. The centralized
Hub can be managed easily but it is not scalable large number
of messages. Federated hub and spoke architecture is
designed to overcome the scalability issue. It allows the loose
coupling between the applications, so the applications can
communicate asynchronously, because of its central style the
integration configuration is less redundant [6][8].
3.3 Bus Topology
Most of the project adopted the Hub-Spoke model were not
successful because of the lack of standards, expensive
proprietary solutions, being heavyweight and worked for the
homogenous. The centralize nature of broker model is the
single point of failure, so the problem of single component
causes the failure of entire network. The Bus model emerged
as a solution to overcome the problems of broker model. It
also used the centralized routing component but it distributes
the tasks to others. These components can be grouped and
hosted on different places in the network, and can be
duplicated geographically for scalability. Other
functionalities like security transaction processing, error
handling, has been identified as the bus model evolved. The
Bus model provided these functions can be enclosed in
separate components. The Bus model becomes a lightweight,
suitable and reliable integration solution. It is abstracted
solution, having consistent pattern, and can be designed with
less coding and no modification to the applications. The bus
model finally came to known as Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
[6][8].
4. CHALLENGES AND PROBLEMS OF
EAI
EAI provides common procedure of communication between
applications and provides integration for business process and
data. EAI provides the integration of business process and
data, and it also provides the mechanism of reusability and
distribution. On the one hand it does not demand high
technical skills for the integration and on the other hand
traditional middleware only provides the integration of data
and requires special set of technical skills [1]. Enterprise
application integration (EAI) is a complex undertaking, and
the following six pitfalls can bedevil the process [7]:
A shortage of limited skills;
Lack of recognition that EAI is an architecture, not
a product;
Neglecting security, performance and monitoring;
Implementing EAI as part of another project;
Going ahead without an integration strategy;
Internal politics and poor communication.

It is reported that 70% of EAI project failed due to the
management issues. According the Chairman of Integration
International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 8887)
Volume 42 No.7, March 2012
44
Consortium European Mr. Steve Craggs these seven main
problems currently faced by the companies as they
implemented EAI solution and these are [3]:
1. Constant change
2. Shortage of EAI experts
3. Competing standards
4. EAI is tool paradigm
5. Building interfaces is an art
6. Loss of detail
7. Accountability
Other researchers identified some more problems as follows
[3]:
1. Emerging requirements
2. Protectionism
According to [4][9] the cost of development of EAI is higher
than traditional approach. Implementation takes more time
and consumes more resources. EAI is complex to build
because of existing enterprise architecture and the EAI has
shortage of required skills. EAI provides more access so, the
security is a big concern as the business and IT changes
rapidly.
5. DISCUSSION AND FUTURE WORK
It was reviewed that how EAI is evolved as information-
oriented (data level), to interface-oriented (application
interface), to process-oriented (method level) and to service-
oriented as Enterprise Service Bus, which is the latest
approach developed so far [10]. Currently Enterprise Service
Bus (ESB) is the most useful architecture to design and
implement EAI solution [11][12][13] but the EAI is still a
challenging area [14] and there is no ideal approach and/or
technology exist to build an integration solution [3]. As
discussed in challenges and problem section that EAI still lack
in standardization [15], but no doubt the Enterprise
Integration Patterns (EIP) [16] is accepted and adopted as de-
facto messaging standards in the integration solution by
researchers [17]. As an future initiative OpenEAI project
started as an initiative to defining messaging structures and
integration standards [10][18]. Keeping in view the context of
challenges, for example, constant change, shortage of EAI
experts, building interface is a complex and difficult and
monitoring. Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) is a
cloud based integration solution [19][20] to design, build,
monitor, and manage integrations centrally and especially
addresses the maintenance challenge of distributed integration
solution and benefits the future adoption of SaaS model [21].
Another example is iON a cloud based iPaaS provides
cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-premise integration [20]. Based
on the problems faced by EAI, for example, vendor lock-in of
proprietary based solution, there are open projects by
independent researchers as well as academic projects. The
proprietary based solutions create a vendor lock-in due to
non-standard implementation [22]. The shortage of EAI
experts, skill set, development complexity of integration
solution, rapid changes in the business etc. demands a
platform independent abstract solution. The academic project,
for example, Guarana DSL suggests EAI solution as, a
platform and technology independent high level abstract
design with MDA (Model Driven Architecture) approach
which can automatically transform Platform Independent
Model (PIM) into a Platform Specific Model (PSM) [3]. No
doubt the future of EAI is based on platform independent
based solutions, but lack of standards, shortage of EAI
experts, constant changes, building complex interfaces and
security in terms of performance and monitoring are to be
reviewed.
6. REFERENCES
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[5] Bc. David Kusak, 2010, Comparison of Enterprise
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[7] Alex Nghiem, August 2002, Web Service Part 6: Models
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[10] David S. Linthicum, October 2001, Merctor Next
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[15] Joe McKendrick, September 2009, ESBs are Patterns,
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