| | JULY 20218CIOReviewIN MY OPINIONEnterprise Application TrendsBusiness Environment ImpactsandBy Farooq Siddiqui, Director, Enterprise Architecture, WellCare Health PlansIn today's world of cloud-native applications and pretty much "everything" as a service model, is Enterprise Application Integration or EAI still relevant? Very much so. In fact, the value of modern EAI is central to the connected paradigm of Internet of Things (IOT), where integrated experiences will be linked through APIs delivered over the cloud, all the while using existing EAI infrastructure.What is EAI?In simplest terms, EAI refers to the technology implementation that connects applications and/or systems within an enterprise. When such a service (or platform) is provided between different enterprises (aka organizations), it is referred to as B2B (Business-to-Business) integration. Although B2B may use many EAI components, it provides additional services such as trading partner management etc. that are specific to integrating with an external entity.EAI technologies generally fall in the Middleware category, as opposed to user-facing components or back-end systems. Before the internet and web services became ubiquitous, full middleware platforms were the primary solution for inter-application integration provided by the likes of IBM, Oracle, Tibco etc. to name a few.Historically, there have been 4 main integration styles for EAI: 1) File Transfer, 2) Shared Database, 3) Remote Procedure Call (RPC), and 4) Messaging.1. File transfers and shared databases have been extensively used for application integration over the years. Once the internet became ubiquitous, web services (REST or SOAP) became a common way to implement RPC, with the added benefit of supporting non-binary (text) data. As the demands for higher volume and lower latency continued in the EAI space, the industry turned to the Messaging style for the best combination of transactional volume, latency, and application decoupling as described by Hohpe and Woolf in the de facto integration bible for EAI ­ Enterprise Integration Patterns. [Hohpe, G., & Woolf, B. (2004). Enterprise Integration Patterns: Designing, Building, and Deploying Messaging Solutions. Addison-Wesley Professional.]Why is EAI more important than ever in the Cloud era?With cloud becoming ever-more common, an increasing number of enterprise applications are being deployed to the cloud ­ be it public, private, or hybrid. Still, this leaves many enterprise applications and much of the enterprise data deployed to legacy infrastructure. Rather than making EAI disappear, this new compute-storage-networking paradigm has only made EAI more critical than ever for enterprises.Whether in manufacturing supply chains or retail digital experiences or connected health, how will these systems communicate with one another? Most effectively by building Event Driven Architecture into their applications and using APIs over the cloud leveraging existing EAI infrastructure
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