Requirements for an Enterprise Application integration tool

Abstract

As companies try to keep up with the competition they often rely on information technology (IT) to make the business work more efficiently and cheaper. As the amount of IT and software increases the companies need to utilize different applications to communicate with each other. Otherwise same data would need to be inserted into each application separately, thus making the business work less efficiently. To help with the communication problem many different kinds of applications have been created. These tools are called Enterprise Application Integration tools. The problem is that the number of tools is very large and finding the most suitable tool can be an overwhelming task.

This study presents a set of qualities in software that are important in Enterprise Application Integration tools. As a research method this study adopts a case study of a company trying to find a tool to help integration process with an ERP product. Some recommendations for a suitable tool are given as a conclusion of the case study.

The study ends in general conclusions by expanding the conclusions made in the case study to support a more general decision making process. Main conclusion is that there are 9 qualities of an EAI product that should be paid attention to. These qualities are: Stability, Changeability, Security, Performance/Scalability, Connectivity, Management/Monitoring, Message Transformation, Routing and Pricing.

Keywords:Enterprise Application Integration, EAI, Asynchronous, Messaging, ESB, Enterprise Service Bus, Integration