Department of Computer Application

National Institute of Technology, Kurukshetra,

Haryana, India

ENTERPRISE APPLICATION
INTEGRATION
(2024-2025)

Submitted by: Submitted to:

Name: Aashish Aggarwal Dr. Brijendra Singh
Roll No.: 52221105 Professor
Semester: 5th DCA, NIT KKR
Group: G1
 International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887)
Volume 42– No.7, March 2012

Challenges and Future of Enterprise Application

Integration

Tariq Rahim Soomro Abrar Hasnain Awan

College of Engineering & IT Department of Information
Al Ain University of Science & Technology, SZABIST Dubai
Technology, Al Ain, UAE Campus, UAE

ABSTRACT with the application based on latest technologies but adds

In today’s rapid growing business world, organizations are additional financial overhead to the organization [1].
relying on technology and need of the integration of the Following are few advantages of EAI [3][4]:
disparate applications is in high demand. Enterprise  It helps to access the real time information among
Application Integration (EAI) is use of hardware and software the applications
to integrate a set of Enterprise Computer Applications. This
paper will review the types of EAI along-with its architecture.  It simplifies the business process to improve the
Challenges in the field of EAI will be discussed later and efficiency of the enterprise
finally future of EAI will be discussed.
 It provides the integrity of the information
Keywords  It provides the easy development and maintenance
EAI, Challenges of EAI, Future of EAI and ESB.
 It improves the customer relationships
1. INTRODUCTION
Today the organizations heavily rely on the technologies  It improves the supply chain relationship
which are of different nature and the applications running in  It keeps legacy applications alive
different business units based on different technologies. So
the integration of these applications into a unified set of  It improves the business process and time to market
business process has emerged as a priority. Enterprise is reduced
Application Integration (EAI) provides a mechanism to share
both processes and data. In the competitive business  It supports the business and organizational changes
environment to shorten the application development life cycle in some extent
and to reduce the financial cost the reuse of existing database  It brings the standard approach in applications
and application is a first choice instead of recreation. The
organization systems are based on new and old technologies  It brings responsive technology to changing
and use the broad range of platforms, databases and business needs
application, and based on different programming languages.
 It reshapes the applications according to current and
Forester Research estimates that up to 35 percent of
future business needs
development time and 30 percent of development cost is spent
to creating interfaces and points of integration for applications This paper organized as follows, section 2 will review types
and data sources. Therefore, the solution is the EAI; as it is of EAI; section 3 will review its architecture; section 4 will
the collection of technologies and approaches to provide review the challenges and problems of EAI and final section
short-term and cost-effective solution. It is a technology- will discuss EAI along-with future work in the field of EAI.
business philosophy where all enterprise systems can share
information and logic in easiest way. Using EAI applications 2. TYPES OF EAI
share data and process without changing the applications and The Enterprise Application Integration can be performed on
their data structures which is cost effective [1]. According to different levels as following and shown in Figure-1 bellow
[2] EAI is “the combination of processes, software, standards, [1]:
and hardware resulting in the seamless integration of two or
more enterprise systems allowing them to operate as one”.  Data level
EAI is the solution for the applications developed without  Application Interface level
central vision or strategy and served a single purpose. The
applications can be for example, inventory control, sales  Method level
automation, general ledger, and human resource. The
applications are built for the specific need and based on the  User Interface level
technology-of-the-day, built on non-standard approach and
can-not interoperate. The old applications can be replaced

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 International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887)
Volume 42– No.7, March 2012

2.1 Data-level EAI for the customized needs for small infrastructure and if the
Data-level EAI is related to the data integration, this technique number of applications increased, the connections are
is used in typical EAI-enabled enterprise. The data is moved exponentially increased [1][6][7].
from one data store to another and processes the information
if required. The main advantage of this approach is that there
3.2 Hub-Spoke Topology
is no code change which saves the cost of redevelopment [1]. 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].

Fig 1: Types of EAI [1]

3.3 Bus Topology
Most of the project adopted the Hub-Spoke model were not
2.2 Application Interface-level EAI successful because of the lack of standards, expensive
The business process and data is accessed through the proprietary solutions, being heavyweight and worked for the
interfaces with this approach. The applications can be homogenous. The centralize nature of broker model is the
bundled together and share the business logic and data but the single point of failure, so the problem of single component
application interfaces have specific features and functions. causes the failure of entire network. The Bus model emerged
This approach is mostly used with the packaged applications. as a solution to overcome the problems of broker model. It
Message brokers are used here as preferred alternative also used the centralized routing component but it distributes
solution [1]. the tasks to others. These components can be grouped and
hosted on different places in the network, and can be
2.3 Method-level EAI duplicated geographically for scalability. Other
Method-level EAI shares the business logic. A method can be functionalities like security transaction processing, error
access by many applications and applications can access each handling, has been identified as the bus model evolved. The
other’s method. It can be achieved in many ways, including Bus model provided these functions can be enclosed in
distributed objects, application servers, TP (transaction separate components. The Bus model becomes a lightweight,
processing) monitors, frameworks, and reusing the existing suitable and reliable integration solution. It is abstracted
applications for creating new application. This approach is solution, having consistent pattern, and can be designed with
being used for long period as we reuse the business logic to less coding and no modification to the applications. The bus
reduce the development efforts. But this approach is not very model finally came to known as Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
effective due to technological and human constraints, and also [6][8].
due to the different needs of the problem domain [1].
4. CHALLENGES AND PROBLEMS OF
2.4 User Interface-level EAI EAI
This approach bundles the applications use their user EAI provides common procedure of communication between
interfaces. The mainframe applications can be accessed applications and provides integration for business process and
through this approach. This is not a preferred approach but is data. EAI provides the integration of business process and
being used for years [1]. data, and it also provides the mechanism of reusability and
distribution. On the one hand it does not demand high
3. EAI ARCHITECTURES technical skills for the integration and on the other hand
EAI can also be categorized according to its design structure. traditional middleware only provides the integration of data
Following are known architectures of EAI [5]: and requires special set of technical skills [1]. Enterprise
application integration (EAI) is a complex undertaking, and
 Point-to-Point topology
the following six pitfalls can bedevil the process [7]:
 Hub-Spoke topology
 A shortage of limited skills;
 Bus Topology
 Lack of recognition that EAI is an architecture, not
3.1 Point-to-Point Topology a product;
Point-to-Point (P2P) considered as a traditional integration  Neglecting security, performance and monitoring;
approach. It allows one application to connect to one
application using a pipe. An application communicates with  Implementing EAI as part of another project;
its pair using a procedure call or message. A connector is
 Going ahead without an integration strategy;
implemented for each pair of applications to communicate.
The connector is responsible for the data transformation and  Internal politics and poor communication.
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 It is reported that 70% of EAI project failed due to the
applications are integrated; it can be easily build and deploy management issues. According the Chairman of Integration

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 International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887)
Volume 42– No.7, March 2012

Consortium European Mr. Steve Craggs these seven main doubt the future of EAI is based on platform independent
problems currently faced by the companies as they based solutions, but lack of standards, shortage of EAI
implemented EAI solution and these are [3]: experts, constant changes, building complex interfaces and
security in terms of performance and monitoring are to be
1. Constant change reviewed.
2. Shortage of EAI experts
6. REFERENCES
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5. Building interfaces is an art
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7. Accountability
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 International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887)
Volume 42– No.7, March 2012

No. 2, 2008, www.sistedes.es/TJISBD/Vol-2/No- [19] Interarbor Solution LLC, 2011, MuleSoft takes full-
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