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Chapter 11 • Supply Chain Management 321

traditional brick-and-mortar operations to more sophisticated processes, along with the repercussions
of mergers and acquisitions, makes it a necessity to respond to the ever-changing market demands.
Application integration has become essential for a company’s success in today’s economy.
A standard EAI system provides a broad range of services that range from security
management to protocol management to data mapping, among other related functions. These
services define the functionality and flow of data in the application. EAI solutions can benefit
an organization by providing end-to-end visibility and control of business operations. This
control improves interactions with partners and customers, increases responsiveness to busi-
ness changes, enables new market opportunities, and makes captured knowledge more widely
available. Companies need integration that can be set up, taken down, and changed quickly,
and that can work with a variety of partners, systems, and rapidly changing technologies. In
case of application-integration, the focus lies largely on integrating one production application
with the other, for EAI middleware is implemented in the form of connectors that handle data
transformation and business logic with such outside systems as the ERP (i.e., SAP,
PeopleSoft), Database (i.e., DB2, MS SQL Server, Oracle), Message Queuing (i.e., Mqseries,
MSMQ), and the like.
As stated, integrating disparate systems is a very complex task. In the past application
integration was a rare achievement and was restricted to a simple exchange of data. EAI requires
a whole new approach to integration. The old approach involved building custom point-to-point
integration one application at a time. This cannot meet the demands of the Internet economy,
wherein companies need to integrate their business processes quickly with dozens, even
hundreds, of other companies. Today, with the introduction of such component-based models as
EJB, DCOM, and CORBA, it has become relatively easier to provide software applications as
congregations of stand-alone and independent business components that communicate with the
business processes through a standard set of APIs.
Many of the companies today are embracing the component-based applications. This is
either by developing a new application or by componentizing their existing applications. The
component approach involves splitting up the colossal applications into an assembly of numer-
ous independent business components. DCOM and CORBA/IIOP are the two main protocols for
object communication across networks, including the Internet. Both are platform independent
programming models that support compatibility between applications in a complex system.
DCOM is used for Windows-based applications, and CORBA is found on many platforms.
Simple object access protocol (SOAP) is a communication protocol that defines a new way for
processes on different systems to communicate, the heart of which is the extensible mark-up
language. XML has emerged as the leading business-to-business integration and enterprise
application candidate. XML is fast becoming the unifier among integrated systems.
Phases of Enterprise Application Integration Process

There are several phases of an EAI process, including the following:
•Solution outline phase
•Architecture phase
•Design phase
•Implementation phase
The end result of this process is a consolidated, consistent, and coherent view of the vital information
that’s accessible from multiple points across the enterprise.