Enterprise Application Integration Platforms 101

Introduction

Application integration at its simplest is often just one application sending a message to another to notify it of some change. Perhaps when a patient arrives at a hospital, the registration system will send a message to clinical systems so they have all demographic data ready to use. Of perhaps it is just a nightly file transfer from the sales system to the accounting system.

But modern application integration platforms or suites can do a lot more than this to help applications work together and add real value to the enterprise.

Lots of terms have come into use over the years to describe different aspects and styles of integration, such as ESB, SOA, messaging, interface engine, Business Process Orchestration, composite applications, and many others. This paper briefly puts these terms in context and describes how they fit together to provide different levels of sophistication in your application integration solution.

Some products address all or most of these areas, others address one niche, while others come as suites of products that collectively address the majority of the concepts.