What Does Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) Mean?

Enterprise application integration (EAI) is the use of technologies and services across an enterprise to enable the integration of software applications and hardware systems. Many proprietary and open projects provide EAI solution support.

Techopedia Explains Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)

Intercommunication between enterprise applications (EA), such as customer relations management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM) and business intelligence is not automated. Thus, EAs do not share common data or business rules. EAI links EA applications to simplify and automate business processes without applying excessive application or data structure changes.

However, EAI is challenged by different operating systems, database architectures and/or computer languages, as well as other situations where legacy systems are no longer supported by the original manufacturers.

EAI meets these challenges by fulfilling three purposes, as follows: