What do these words have in common? Well for one they all describe the ever-evolving face of business in the global economy. They also describe the software solution which can help your business move with the times to close the (information) gaps in the decision-making process, increase competitive advantage and dramatically reduce IT-related costs.

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is software which mechanizes the way business applications and databases share and update data by facilitating the alignment of disparate systems. In other words, EAI creates a generic platform through which business processes and data can talk to each other and exchange information in a common language across varied applications such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), other packaged software applications, Legacy systems and web-based applications.

Enabling this platform is Middleware, a service-oriented application which allows the addition and subtraction of applications from networks without affecting other applications. In this way, an enterprise using traditional (or Legacy) applications and databases can combine these with more modern systems and software that exploit the Internet, e-commerce, extranet and other new technologies; and derive 'smart reports' from information assimilated from both systems.

In the past, businesses relied upon point-to-point application integration to connect disparate applications. However, this can result in too many tightly coupled links between systems which are brittle and difficult to upgrade and maintain for businesses utilising more than two or three applications that are required to communicate.

ILLUMINAT has partnered with some of the world's leading EAI software providers to offer you the EAI solution which best suits your business dynamics. Our current partners include BEA Systems (BEA Weblogic Integration), Vignette Corporation (Vignette V7 Integration Services) Microsoft Corporation (Biztalk) and Oracle Corporation (Oracle Fusion Middleware).

A software solution that's cross-industry and trans-business-type, ILLUMINAT's EAI solutions can help your business by:

• facilitating quick responses to changing business conditions
• allowing intuitive business planning by providing managers with consolidated, holistic information at their finger tips (as opposed to manually compiling reports from information derived from disparate systems)
• alleviating IT-related development and maintenance costs
• enabling IT personnel to strategically plan for future integration thereby facilitating flexibility and cost-efficiency by maximising reuse and leveraging existing framework
• offering the most reliable bridge between systems of merging enterprises
• permitting users who understand little about the details of applications to integrate them
• automating the process through which applications update and share information to fit the best business process rather than forcing business processes to work within application constraints
• providing security, scalability and integrity of system.

Furthermore, ILLUMINAT's EAI Solutions comprise methodologies which allow for 'object-oriented programming', 'cross-platform program communication', and 'enterprise-wide content and data distribution' using common databases and data standards executed through Extensible Markup Language (XML), middleware, message queuing and other technologies.

For further information on ILLUMINAT's EAI solutions, software purchase and installation, please contact our e-Business Department at webreg@illuminatnm.com.