Research has revealed over 30 percent of IT expenditure is on integration, with software costs running into millions of dollars for large enterprises. Most big enterprises have a network of homegrown, legacy mainframe, and packaged applications that need to share information and functionality. Sadly, most of these systems are proprietary to the dealer, and were written in diverse programming languages with diverse data structures. Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is used to integrate applications inside the firewall.

B2B integration extends integration beyond the enterprise to customers, partners, and

suppliers. The budding Web Services model goes even further by defining a single set of standards for integration both inside and outside the enterprise.

Consequently, vendors in EAI and B2B markets will be intensely affected by Web Services. Enterprise Application Integration vendors have introduced packaged integration solutions to help the enterprise develop a

consistent approach to integration for all applications. EAI solutions generally include:-