Enterprise Application Integration is the effective integration of applications to support a business process and achieve business results, whether to improve customer service, speed time to market, achieve greater efficiency or reduce costs.

In recent years, the number of enterprise applications that companies realize are important to deploy within their organizations for competitive and/or operational advantage has greatly increased. These applications include both legacy and packaged IT solutions around enterprise resource management (ERM), supply chain management (SCM), customer relationship management (CRM), e-commerce enablement, data warehousing, business intelligence and other areas of business administration.

Within the increasingly complex environment of the business world, there is a fundamental need for many varied information platforms to be properly enabled and optimized. Furthermore, companies have increasingly come to the realization that it is extremely important within the "e-business" world to possess state of the art business processes that are cohesively enabled by a seamless underlying IT infrastructure. Together, these motivational factors are driving companies to reconsider how their disparate applications communicate, and interact, with each other. In turn, recognition of the unique challenges that this integration poses is driving the need for enterprise application integration (EAI) services in the marketplace.