IT infrastructure at most telecom, financial services and retail companies consists of a large number of business applications and software systems that perform a variety of tasks – e.g. support for marketing, sales, customer service, operations, accounting, human resources, general management and business intelligence.

More often than not these are very diverse information systems – a mix of third-party products (both up-to-date and legacy), systems developed in-house, and custom applications constructed and supported by 3rd party suppliers.

And all these systems are only partially integrated with each other – usually they don’t “talk” to each other and are unable to share data or business rules in ways that the company’s business requires. This lack of communication leads to inefficiencies, wherein identical data are stored in multiple locations, or straightforward processes are unable to be automated.

Enterprise application integration is the process of linking such applications within a single organization together in order to simplify and automate business processes to the greatest extent possible, while at the same time avoiding having to make sweeping changes to the existing applications or data structures.