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In the Beginning

Back in the eighties, stock traders on Wall Street used stand-alone terminals. It soon became obvious that a way to link the terminals, asset trading data, and management systems together was needed, which would make it easier to get an overview of all brokerage information in order to make better decisions. This perhaps was when the concept of application integration was born. After that, many other businesses found they had similar needs.

Many things have pushed the need for integration to the forefront of business concerns. Client-server solutions started taking the place of mainframe systems, for instance, and developers were suddenly able to build more flexible solutions for their companies. In those days, many of the solutions and applications were proprietary to the companies that had developed them. When two companies merged, heterogeneous environments made it difficult to map data. The complexity of all these applications needed to be reduced. A way to get these applications to work together was required, and the answer was application integration. With the Internet explosion in the nineties, new ways for companies to do their business evolved. Business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) opportunities unavoidably led to a need for integration, not only within companies, but also between companies and their customers.

The first generation of EAI solutions was often of a hub-and-spoke architecture or of an integration-bus–oriented one. Suddenly a logical separation started to appear in applications. Data was separated from transport, requests from responses, publisher from subscriber, and so on. Slowly, standards like CORBA and COM started to introduce themselves. People began talking about loosely coupled communication. A problem with CORBA and COM, however, was that they were still fairly proprietary. It was not easy to integrate these two standards. There were also some performance and scalability problems with these methods.

The constant evolution of business continuously drives a change to EAI. Nowadays the term has expanded to also include message brokering, business process flow management, and workflow. As companies try to reduce costs, it becomes more and more important to simplify the creation, management, and modification of integrated applications. Companies cannot rely on technicians and developers all the time when a change has to be made. There is also a great need to reuse business logic to cut costs and reduce complexity. Fortunately, standards like XML, SOAP, Web services, and others have been developed that make it easier, more cost effective, and safer to integrate.


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