Enterprise Application Integration

EAI Service Offerings

From enterprise application integration consulting, through product evaluation, ERP integration and also open source integration Touchpoints has the expertise and experience to ensure continuous, secure, and actionable flows of information across your enterprise.

EAI Consulting

Touchpoints engages with you to evaluate current and future integration needs, and assist with the assessment of disparate information technology systems. Our consultants can also help identify specific problem areas and provide customized EAI solutions.

Product Evaluations

Popular EAI tools are platform and language independent, though certain tools have superior capabilities around certain technologies (.Net, J2EE) and domains (Finance, healthcare, Manufacturing, insurance, public sector). Touchpoints can get engaged at the outset in help assess the integration framework and architecture to enable using certain EAI tools for integration scenarios. Having deep skills in application development and integration, Touchpoints has vast experience in working with leading EAI & ERP tools. Touchpoints is hence, well positioned in providing valuable consulting services such as integration architecture, implementation team, interface development and solution framework.

Adapter Development

Adapter development can be the most complex part of any integration solution. Adapters allow extraction and loading of data from the respective applications and databases to be integrated. Building adapters requires use of the application’s existing API’s, or the API’s provided by EAI tools. EAI tools like IBM MQ/WBI, webMethods and TIBCO provide a suite of adapters for packaged and legacy applications/databases. Touchpoints has engaged in building adapter development work for integrating SAP and other ERP tools and Mainframe applications for leading global organizations.

Legacy Application and Data Integration

This involves integrating backend legacy systems with front-end applications like portals, and CRM solutions. Currently, Touchpoints provides such solutions using leading EAI tools like IBM WebSphere MQ/WBI, TIBCO, BizTalk and webMethods. Touchpoints expertise in Mainframe, relational databases, and other legacy applications gives us an edge in providing integration solutions for complex integration scenarios.

SAP, ORACLE and other ERP Integration

Traditionally, integrating SAP applications with the outside world has been a challenge due to limited interfacing provided by SAP and other ERP vendors. EAI vendors like IBM and webMethods addressed this business need, providing SAP adapters as part of their integration offerings. Recently, SAP has also addressed this issue through its SAP Net Weaver/XI offering. Touchpoints dedicated experts have has enabled our EAI practice to build capabilities to provide SAP Integration solutions, using expertise on both traditional EAI tools and SAP XI.

Enabling SOA through SOA / Web services / Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)

A service-oriented architecture (SOA) is based on a collection of services that communicate with each other. The services are self-contained and one service does not depend on the context or state of another service. They work within a distributed systems architecture and are platform and language agnostic. SOA-based architecture is currently adopted using an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), a method that is widely gaining acceptance.

The ESB provides a non-proprietary integration backbone for applications and services to communicate with each other, providing messaging, message brokering, and service orchestration services using industry standards. Touchpoints has significant experience implementing EAI tool-based SOA/ESB solutions.

Open Source and Standards-Based Integration

There is now a noticeable shift towards Open Source and standards-based integration technologies. Touchpoints origin was building custom applications using open source. Touchpoints understands that this is mainly due to the vendor monopolies on integration technologies – resulting in costly solutions, vendor lock-ins, and proprietary technologies. Open Source and standards-based solutions mean increase in development times, but the solutions are light-weight, cheaper, and ensure no vendor lock-in. Touchpoints brings experience in consulting, solution architecture, business analysis, and developing solutions using Open Source technologies like JBOSS ESB/messaging, JBPM, Mule, and JRules; and standard technologies like XML/XSLT/XPATH, JBI, and JMS to name a few.