Business integration is a long term issue for most large, medium and even small organizations and enterprises. After years of investment in the automation of specific applications - from accounting to inventory, from customer relationship management to MRP, from logistics to call centers - organizations find they possess many applications with little cohesion between them. This is no longer tolerable. Action is required - to build automated connections between those applications.
This handbook, which includes four case studies, is an introduction to business application integration (BAI). While much interest currently comes from larger enterprises, its case studies and recommendations about how to approach BAI are applicable to any size of organization where multiple applications need to work together to improve internal business effectiveness. But BAI is not limited to such intra-business activities. The arrival of the Internet increasingly obliges organizations to make selected applications available to partners, suppliers and/or customers, thus providing a whole extra justification for introducing a systematic approach to business application integration (the 'Five Axes').
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