The speed of business is accelerating and only by integrating and making business process more efficient is how organizations can respond to fast-changing customer and market demands in real time. Organizations need to integrate business processes between different applications in order to accelerate their revenue growth, increase productivity, and reflect business performance. The integration imperative is even more demanding as supply and demand chains have become increasingly interdependent, requiring organizations to integrate the extended enterprise to make sure the feasibility of their entire partner ecosystems.

EAI is the process of coordinating the operation of various applications across an enterprise. Typically, an enterprise has existing legacy applications and databases and wants to continue to use them while adding or migrating to a new set of applications that makes use of the Internet, e-commerce, extranet, CRM, Billing and other new technologies based on requirements. EAI may involve developing a new total view of an enterprise's business and its applications, seeing how existing applications fit into the new model, and then devising ways to efficiently reuse what already exists while adding new applications and data. .Now a days EAI is commonly used while defining new enterprise wide systems which makes use of multiple systems (for example CRM, Portals, Billing, Data warehousing etc.), those are proven in the market.

The very origin of EAI solutions can be linked to the need for providing a full duplex, bi-directional solution to share seamlessly and exchange data between ERP, CRM, SCM, databases, data warehouses, and other important internal systems within the company. To meet these requirements, Siebel Systems has pioneered Universal Application Network. To integrate Siebel eBusiness Applications into the Universal Application Network. Siebel Systems continues to enhance the integration tool set within Siebel applications—Siebel eBusiness Application Integration(Siebel EAI).

Universal Application Network (UAN) is an integration solution containing a library of prepackaged, industry-specific business processes that extent multiple applications within and across the enterprise primarily focused on customer interactions and reflect industry best practices. UAN is built based on open industry standards such as Extensible Markup Language (XML) and Web Services-enabling enterprises. Siebel EAI provides components for integrating Siebel eBusiness Applications with external applications and technologies within your company and is designed to work with third-party solutions such as those from IBM, TIBCO, Vitria, SeeBeyond, webMethods, and others. Siebel EAI provides batch and bidirectional real-time solutions for integrating Siebel applications with other applications as well as the tools for cross application integration through UAN. Siebel EAI is designed as a set of interfaces that interact with each other and with other components within Siebel application.

These interfaces:


Web Services are based on communication protocols that include HTTP, XML, Simple Object Application Protocol (SOAP), and Web Services Description Language (WSDL). A Web Service can be developed on any computer platform and in any development environment as long as it can communicate with other Web Services using these common protocols.

EAI and Web Services

Web Services are not EAI in and of themselves. Rather, Web Services are just another technology that enables EAI, and it can significantly change the traditional point-to-point approach. Web Services offer a platform neutral approach for integrating applications, so that it can be used to integrate diverse systems, in a way supported by standards rather than proprietary systems. The ability of an enterprise to have access to real-time information spanning across multiple departments, applications, platforms and systems is one of the most important driving factors behind the adoption of Web Services. Using Web Services that loosely integrate applications, a company achieves just a subsection of EAI. EAI, on the other hand, takes a complete holistic approach of tightly integrating and connecting all applications and systems that support a company's business. EAI takes years of continued commitment and effort from different business and technical units within the company, high investment, and substantial resources. Web Services, in their current form of loosely bound collections of services, are more of an ad hoc solution that can be developed quickly and easily, published, discovered, and bound dynamically. In this generation of Web Services, it is possible to achieve only function level integration between applications. They are not transactional in nature and provide basic "request/response" functionality. The next generation of Web Services, however, will be functionally and technologically advanced, offering user interface encapsulation and security. They will be able to package an application and embed it into another application. The current EAI solutions that predominately focus on integrating applications will have to be changed significantly, as packaged applications in the future will expose their functions as services using technologies such as XML, SOAP, and UDDI. Thus, the EAI solutions will have to provide a broad support for service integration rather than application integration.

Salient Differences between Traditional EAI Solutions and Web Services A few essential differences between traditional EAI solutions and Web Services are, as follows:

Simple: There is no doubt that Web Services are much simpler to design, develop, maintain, and use as compared to a typical EAI solution which may involve distributed technology such as DCOM and CORBA. Once the framework of developing and using Web Services is ready, it will be relatively easy to automate new business processes spanning across multiple applications.
Open Standards: Unlike proprietary EAI solutions, Web Services are based on open standards such as UDDI, SOAP, HTTP and this is probably the single most important factor that would lead to the wide adoption of Web Services. The fact that they are built on existing and ubiquitous protocols eliminates the need for companies to invest in supporting new network protocols.
Flexible: Since EAI solutions may require point-to-point integration, changes made at one end have to be propagated to the other end, making them very rigid and time consuming in nature. Web Services based integration is quite flexible, as it is built on loose coupling between the application publishing the services and the application using those services.

Cheap: EAI solutions, such as message brokers, are very expensive to implement. Web Services, in the future, may accomplish many of the same goals - cheaper and faster.
Scope: EAI solutions, such as message brokers, integrate applications treating them as single entities, whereas Web Services allow companies to break down big applications into small independent logical units and build wrappers around them. For example, a company can write wrappers for different business components of an ERP application such as order management - purchase order acceptance, status of order, order confirmation, accounts receivable, and accounts payable.
Efficient: As mentioned in the previous point, Web Services allow applications to be broken down into smaller logical components, which makes the integration of applications easier as it is done on a granular basis. This makes Web Services solutions for EAI much more efficient than traditional EAI solutions.
Dynamic: Web Services provide a dynamic approach to integration by offering dynamic interfaces, whereas traditional EAI solutions are pretty much static in nature.
Web Services could eliminate the high cost and complexity of application integration. And that began to change when IBM and Microsoft published the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) specification in May of 2000. The Web Services model represents a universal acceptance on the part of software vendors that integration middleware built on open standards is both possible and beneficial. Siebel and other industry players are uniting behind a single set of core
standards based on: