Enspiria® Solutions | Technologies | Enterprise Infrastructure

Enterprise integration provides an accurate and seamless information exchange between different systems. Enterprise integration is an evolving field composed of several major elements, including enterprise application integration (EAI), business process integration (BPI) and enterprise information integration (EII).

While the benefits of enterprise integration are great and a business case can usually substantiate a sizeable return on investment (ROI), there are significant technical challenges to implementing enterprise integration in a utility IT environment:

Legacy systems are "silos" and "islands" and often are not readily adaptable to an integration framework.
Information residing in systems can be proprietary, hard to get to and not designed for sharing with external applications or systems. Migrating or consolidating data from old systems to new can be complicated and time-consuming.
Organizational change issues can be large as multiple silos are broken down and business processes are optimized.

Integration Framework
When organizations think of enterprise integration, they typically look at an EAI suite or framework to enable business process optimization. EAI usually uses middleware to integrate the application programs, databases and legacy systems involved in an organization's critical business processes. Newer EAI technologies use web services as a means of integration. The current state of the art recognizes that an enterprise service bus (ESB) approach that connects previously stovepiped systems together is the strongest EAI methodology.

EAI benefits both maintenance of the IT suite and its initial construction. Studies have shown that EAI reduces the cost of new interfaces by much as 50 percent and the cost of maintaining those interfaces by a whopping 80 percent. Implementing an ESB solution not only maximizes the benefits of previously stovepiped systems, it also improves IT budgets and resources throughout the product lifecycle.

Enspiria's staff has extensive experience in design and deployment of enterprise integration solutions. Enspiria's Enterprise Oriented Architecture^SM is an integrated enterprise architecture framework for utilities, cable service providers and public sector organizations.