Enterprise Application Integration
The alternatives to ETL technologies are the EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) and EII (Enterprise Information Integration) technologies which can access data from a variety of sources. Enterprise Application Integration integrates applications and helps to access data from them. One example of how a company leverages such a technology is Virgin Mobile which needed to rapidly expand its services in the USA without sinking investments in an elaborate IT infrastructure. It struck an agreement to use Sprint’s operating infrastructure, for the phone service, which was integrated with its CRM and financial software using process integration software. The problem with simple integration of applications is that their data definitions or the metadata may not be the same so that it would be hard to extract data without standardizing their definitions. On the other hand, EII helps to both integrate the applications and uses XML to match the taxonomy of the data extracted.
For real time applications, BI software will have to work with both historical and current information. Enterprise Information Integration software is able to draw information from both the data warehouse as well as operational data stores in real time as transactions happen. When the data is drawn directly from operational data stores, it is not cleansed of inconsistencies in data definitions or duplication. A BI tool, such as Cognos ReportNet, uses Composite Software’s Composite Information Server, to extract information from data repositories throughout an enterprise and create a single, more comprehensive data source.
One application of the EII technology is the case of Owens Corning which combined its EII software and the BI software to generate reports on gross margins earned every day. The data was extracted from its numerous ERP databases. In the past, the same exercise took about a month. The reduction of the lag time in reporting has helped Owens to make mid-course corrections.