Why is enterprise application integration important?
Most businesses use several software products from different vendors in their day-to-day operations. These applications can have different uses, data stores and methods of operation. This can create data silos where data is either duplicated between databases or is available in one but not another. That leads to data inconsistency when users need to manually copy and paste data between applications. Users may also need to consult several applications for their daily work.
EAI provides a methodology that helps these disparate applications share data and workflows to reduce manual steps and errors and to provide better insight into organizational data. This becomes more important as an organization grows and as technology advances.
In the past, all business workflows were manual and carried out on paper. As computers automated work for users, the day-to-day assignments of information workers quickly became formatting data and transferring it from one system to another. This need to quickly make data available between applications will only increase as more organizations adopt microservices, software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) tools.
