Benefits of Business Integration

Aside from general computing infrastructure, one of the largest IT investments in nearly every organization is line-of-business (LOB) applications. These applications are at the heart of an organization's operations, embodying their unique way of doing business. They would be expensive and painful to rewrite, and such an endeavor would be disruptive to normal operations. Therefore such systems often outlast their underlying technology. They endure, often long after their authors have departed the company. Indeed, you know when you truly have a legacy system when there is no longer anyone around to support it. The core value of EAI is to add extra life to LOB systems, allowing them to work together more closely and enabling them for the Internet age.

EAI can reduce the time to market for new products and services. In a typical stovepipe enterprise, each application and business process stands alone. Integration is accomplished through manual, human intervention. Reports are generated from separate systems and passed to analysts, who reconcile the statistics they generate. Through EAI, new patterns are visible sooner, and the steps in creating new product and service offerings can be shortened .

Another benefit of EAI is easy to measure: the cost per transaction. Pennies quickly add up to millions of dollars when you are considering them in terms of cost per transaction. Nearly all ordering activity is expensive, whether it is customers purchasing your product or your employees buying travel, office supplies , or marketing support. Many businesses are following the lead of Microsoft in providing intranet e-commerce applications that dramatically streamline these processes. For instance, new employees can enter their orders for business cards, and these orders are automatically routed for approval and then placed with the supplier electronically . When you put all these benefits together, you derive increased business agility through faster communication with business partners and better linkages among internal systems.