Enterprise business process integration

First generation enterprise application integration (hereinafter, "EAl") focused on data integration and stressed on converting data between disparate formats. Then enterprises looked for integrating packages at the application level. That led to brittle and point-to-point connections between the applications allowing them to share information with other systems inside or outside of the organization. This information oriented point-to-point application integration has been quite popular for some time before the enterprises understood the importance of business processes to sustain continuous growth and profit in extremely tough market conditions. To align the business vision of an organization with the business processes, software architects are looking at the application integration at a higher level of abstraction called enterprises business process integration. This model allows the exchange of information between the applications as a part of a business process which is controlled by a business process management (hereinafter, "BPM") package. This paper discusses about the issues involved with traditional EAI approaches and how business process integration (hereinafter, "BPI") can overcome these issues. It presents an architectural approach to the business process integration that highlights the ideal integration methodologies for applications both inside and outside of the organization leveraging the latest technologies like Web services and XML messaging.