Enterprise Application Integration is a broad discipline, with a huge variety of tools available. There are, however a few obvious patterns:

Portals

Portals integrate the display of data from different systems. Sometimes it is simply reformatted, sometimes it is transformed more extensively (or example looking up codes from one system in another).

Workflow

Workflow systems provide integration "behind the scenes", by orchestrating the use of multiple systems to resolve a single transaction. They genreally devote a lot of effort to allowing the user to monitor the state of their transactions.

Integration Applications

An integration application is one that ties together processes from several back end systems into a new application. Sometimes one or more of the other techniques may be used to accomplish each integration. Additionally, integration applications are sometimes able to take advantage of AP Is? provided by the applications to be integrated.

Messaging

Nessaging is integratin systems by adding the ability to send and receive a defined set of messages. In some ways, this is the most powerful of the integration techniques, since intelligent routing can allow a large number of systems to participate in a single transaction in a highly asynchronous fashion.

Data Sharing/Adaptation

The data model of one application is made directly accessible to another, possibly through the use of database middleware that provides on the fly data transformation.

Data Integration

Traditionally called data warehouses or data marts, it is now common to build external database that hold data merged from one or more applications. Sometimes it is used only for decision support type applications but more and more, this integrated data is being used operationally.

Info-Scape consultants have experience in all of these approaches to integration, with a wide variety of tools. Let us help your organization integrate your systems.