While doing research for this article, I would have loved to come upon some nice ASP success stories touting just how efficiently they can integrate with corporate in-house applications and data. Unfortunately, I found nothing of the sort. It is true that the ASP market is still very young and market players are primarily concerned with making a name for themselves. For the moment, real world issues have been put on the back burner and will be addressed later. The following analysis is not limited to ASP and may apply each time you are faced with an EAI issue.
Solutions do exist.
Over-hyping XML is quite common today, but XML alone can neither solve all EAI issues nor save ASP vendors. We'll try to outline typical situations in which the available solutions can be used. The point of intersection of these two points will give you a good idea of the performance level you need to reach. I won't numerate this level, but it could indeed be calculated by multiplying the volume of data exchanged by the frequency of the exchanges. This aspect has a huge impact on the size of the data compared to the same data encoded in binary format.