Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) - Overview
An organization may contain numerous business areas like inventory control, sales automation, purchase order, invoice generation, shipment, human resources, etc., and these may be maintained in distinct applications like ERP, SCM, CRM, legacy systems etc. An Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is one which interacts between these systems and integrate them as if they were one global application to implement and deliver business initiatives of an organization.
EAI and ETL (Extraction, Transformation and Loading) may be common and different in some aspects. In general, EAI and ETL extract the data from different sources and load the data into some particular target but numerous factors like budget, business needs, user requirements, regulations to be adopted decides about the tool to be selected by the topmost executives of the enterprise.