It meets the need for multiple systems to collaborate with each other. It also allows multiple companies to collaborate to solve common business problems. Traditionally, it meant building an application, putting it on a hardware platform, enabling the application, packaging it, and shipping it for one system. EAI looks at the enterprise the way a city planner looks at a city. There are multiple buildings of varying ages and designs, but the city needs to put in the infrastructure to serve them all.
Information is held by many diverse systems on different platforms and across geography.
EAI uses a variety of integration technologies based on the need to share information and solve enterprise business process problems across geography, heterogeneous applications, and infrastructure environments. EAI acts as the glue between the various IT components and allows the extended enterprise to have a seamless image of this information. This seamless image enables the extended enterprise to move and share data, use the data to form business intelligence, and provide the flexibility to react quickly to changes in the business landscape. The traditional IT model created vertical silos for a particular business function. This produced an environment where business functions in one application were often duplicated in another.