 "Mushrooming Of Applications Boost Demand For EAI Tools")
Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) has come up as a rescue tool for enterprises in the packaged software industry. As organisations begin to realise the necessity of interconnection of disparate systems to meet the needs of the business, the significance of integration technology is being felt. It’s become an important milestone for every enterprise to effectively architect, design and develop systems based on EAI technology.
The challenge of integrating applications
Companies integrate systems for many reasons, including compliance, the need to replace obsolete systems, poor quality and visibility of information and the need for scalable systems that can support business growth. Documentation of legacy software could be inadequate, and those who have good information about this may not be available in the organisation. Legacy software at times is written using languages and platforms that have become obsolete, so getting the resources to work on the said software becomes a challenge.
Says Satish Pendse, CIO, Hindustan Construction Company Ltd, “Integration may be an overhead since it involves linkage with different databases and platforms. This may slow down the software as well. One may need to invest in additional hardware to counter it. Code optimisation is also critical and formats for the same field are dissimilar. For example, the master codification will be different in different systems. At times they may not have one-to-one linkage and hence integrating them will be a challenge.”
Enterprises are migrating to newer applications not only for business benefits but also to make the whole IT infrastructure a user-friendly environment. Says Suresh A Shanmugam, national head, Information Systems and Technology, Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services Ltd, “We have migrated thrice for different areas to upgrade to the latest applications software, further integrating with the legacy software. Generally, legacy software has more practices used for specific time and might have the best practices of the team or the unique business model on the legacy which will lead to a migration to large business applications largely on best practices of the market. So both risks pose a major challenge for the system for which we have to use domain expertise with market best practice and software.”
Tiding over the environment of isolated islands
The applications are considered as isolated islands as they don’t ’talk’ to each other. Therefore it is essential for the user companies to use EAI to bring various deployed applications into one integrated environment. A large part of the legacy applications of Hindustan Construction Company have been replaced by SAP. There are a few, however, that need to continue because their functionality is not provided by SAP. Integration of these applications with SAP is important for the company.
Further, for long-term benefits, enterprise applications will have multiple tasks, which will integrate multiple tools for different purposes. The major interaction is defined based on the model and usage of the system. Says Shanmugam, “It is purely the demand raised by the users and the new requirements implemented for the large level flows through the business process, that project the exact controls through the system to differentiate major service and control roles as per the company’s requirements.” Organisations use various EAI tools or access control tools to tide over the situation of isolated applications.
Benefits of vendor consolidation
There are a number of distinct benefits EAI offers business houses. Vendor consolidation is bringing a huge relief to enterprises. After the acquisition of Business Objects by SAP and Hyperion by Oracle and various other software vendors, it has become easier for user companies to integrate these applications. Vendors are likely to integrate products they have acquired and the ones they already possess.
Further, future versions of products are likely to cover a mix of best features of different products. So new versions coming out are likely to be superior. Maintenance and availability of resources to monitor and maintain multiple versions can be very difficult. Further standardisation towards people process technology needs the globe to be more on consolidated.
Says Pendse, “We will now be required to deal with fewer vendors, which is advantageous especially from the maintenance and application integration perspectives. One disadvantage of consolidation is that the number of competitors and hence the competition in the market gets reduced. In the long run, this may result in increasing the dominance of a few large vendors, which will be a limitation for buyers of technologies.”