What is EII?

Enterprise Information Integration (EII) refers to technology and business best-practices for the real-time aggregation of corporate data across multiple, potentially widely disparate, data sources. EII delivers comprehensive, reusable “views” of customers, products, employees, and more.

By presenting distributed data as if it exists in a single location, EII accelerates the development and maintenance of analytical and composite applications, improving corporate decision-making, customer service, compliance, or operating efficiency. The unified data is exposed via SQL and/or Web Services to business intelligence dashboards, spreadsheets, reports, single-view-type applications, CRM, and/or ERP applications.

EII has traditional ties to concepts such as distributed query or virtual database but includes concepts of federation (different vendors) broader data sources (not just relational, but including flat files, XML sources, and applications), broader access (not just SQL), and higher performance. With advancement in the speed of network bandwidth and available memory and CPU power, EII is gaining wider acceptance. In addition, some EII vendors have optimized queries through special techniques and algorithms. Today, EII includes the concepts of federated queries, optimized queries, WSDL delivery, and other key features which make real-time data integration practical in a live production environment.

A key distinction of EII compared to other integration technologies is that data is not permanently moved or replicated into a new location or server; rather the source data remains where they are and results persist in the server only as needed for caching. In fact, EII is often used to apply more comprehensive queries to a data warehouse without changing the underlying warehouse schema or ETL plans. Under this scenario, the warehouse provides the master data against which additional or real-time sources are joined.

Enterprise Information Integration (EII) is an emerging technology that is gaining momentum among Global 2000 corporations and large government organizations. Leading technology adopters have developed innovative uses for EII, creating competitive advantage for their organization, while improving internal processes and lowering costs. Below are some examples of EII solutions:

1. Next Generation Business Intelligence
• Providing wider breathe of data for richer reporting
• Real-time data
• Web services and XML data


2. Application Extension
• Automate integration of new data sources
• Reduce IT footprint by shifting resources from manual data integration to a focus on business application support.
• Allow underlying data to remain in its original location, avoiding replication costs, inefficiencies, and consistency problems.


3. Service-Oriented Architecture Onramp
   • Bridge legacy data to service oriented environment
   • Bridge packaged application data to service oriented environment
   
   
4. Building Composite Applications
   • Build new forms of applications with capabilities not possible today
   • Use Web services and the emerging SOA environment to leverage existing services and combine them to build the new generation of applications.
   • EII will provide the data component of composite applications.

Next: EII, EAI and ETL

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