Today Information Technology (IT) has become very critical for successful functioning of any enterprise in this world. Every form of business thrives on some form of automation. Earlier, the automation had been custom developed, but nowadays everything seems to be through packaged applications, which in a way reduced the amount of software development significantly.
Unfortunately these packaged applications, which are self-contained, have become stove-pipe applications. In the past, enterprise system architectures have been poorly planned. Many organizations built systems based on the cool technology of the day without realizing how these systems would somehow, someday, share information. The integration process has to be performed in an enterprise application as there are mainly four levels, such as:
EA Integration Level
EA Integration Technology
Data level Integration
SOA
Application Interface level Integration
XML - common data exchange format and Portable data
Data level Integration