Electronic trade forms the core of most business activities in the modern economy. However, as companies connect to one another in order to trade, the complexity of making a wide range of systems communicate with one another becomes apparent.
It is for this reason that Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is high on the agenda for most executives.
Says Mike van den Bergh, managing director of Gateway Communications in South Africa: "The variety and complexity of systems and interface mechanisms is proving to be a headache for many businesses. Over the years, companies have built their business systems on a variety of platforms. There is a huge range of technologies - from ERP systems to proprietary software - which have to be linked in order to trade electronically.
"Most companies don`t have the resources in terms of skills and technology to connect their business systems to those of their trading partners and for this reason they outsource EAI activities to third parties," he says.
EAI comprises a set of software tools and processes that enable different business applications to work together, regardless of their platform, data format, or physical location. EAI extends a company`s investment in existing legacy systems to cooperate with new ERP systems, and expands the information flow through emerging Internet-based open standards.
"This makes the available information flow accessible not only to company intranets, and selected extranet trading partners, but also the broader Internet community," says van den Bergh.
EAI gateways provide a consistent interface between internal applications, and also to those of the external trading community, thereby minimising the impact of changes on both the internal and external environment. They offer capabilities of expansion, conversion, new initiatives and growth while insulating the internal environment from external considerations of technology, applications, time differences, and operational process differences.
Some companies manage the EAI process themselves but this can become increasingly complicated.
Says van den Bergh: "If organisations do not use some form of gateway or messaging middleware, they must develop these characteristics and functions themselves.
"This may be relatively simple in one-on-one batch environments. However, as soon as the community grows to a reasonable size, the control, audit, recoverability, re-transmissions, conversions and automated single point of access for real-time information flows become more difficult to implement and manage," he says.
Traditional EAI vendors have historically focused only on internal business integration. In contrast, Gateway Communications has addressed the needs of the extended business in developing trading communities.
"There are several business benefits to this," says van den Bergh. "Islands of business processes work together, unleashing powerful information and allowing all authorised users to access the same data, on web servers or other dedicated application platforms.
"Time and costs are reduced through integrated applications and the flow of information between them. The need to write, maintain, and support `glue code` is eliminated," he says.
"A single infrastructure supports the routing of data between the business applications of trading partners, and interprets and processes business rules for that data on the fly. There is a centralized location for audit trails, business rules, tracking of business objects, and error and event notification. Rules of data transformation, data validation and business process are applied without having to write application code."
Van den Bergh adds that the cost of implementing EAI initiatives in-house is prohibitively high for most companies.
"By outsourcing the work, organisations are able to tap into the economies of scale that EAI vendors provide as well as their significant skills sets. EAI vendors are able to insulate organisations from a variety of different technologies and get them trading more efficiently and cost-effectively in an electronic environment," he says.
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