The idea of an integration bus becomes even more useful if providers of commercial applications conform to content standards, including formats such as Extensible Markup Language, which is rapidly becoming accepted as the format of choice for exchanging structured data on the Internet as well as becoming popular in the EAI arena. There also are international committees working on developing standards based on an integration-bus approach. Although the examples previously mentioned have focused on integration among major business systems within a company, some EAI products also can work across the Internet. This allows the same basic approach to be used for e-business. Business Process Management BPM can be defined as modeling, auto-mating and analyzing business processes that flow across a virtual enterprise.
Business processes are the means by which companies deliver value to customers.
Excellent products and services are the result of excellent business processes. Internal business processes control and coordinate the activities of applications and employees within a single company. External business processes control and coordinate the activities of applications and employees across multiple organizations. Many processes include internal and external components. BPM is defined as the ability to explicitly model and automate business processes across an extended enterprise.