A Model for Enterprise Application Integration Tools Evaluation

Many enterprises around the world attempt to satisfy new integration functionality requirements. These are originated by issues such as the use of legacy systems and heterogeneous technologies, high communication development through the Internet that increases the business between enterprise and enterprise–consumer, dynamics of business groups nowadays such as join ventures, organizational merges and takeovers. To carry out these requirements, enterprises have chosen to reconsider and eventually reprogram their computer applications, to implement other enterprise packages or to integrate disparate information systems via Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) projects. Factors such as the high cost in the development of new applications, strong trust on legacy systems, and the need to quickly integrate disparate information systems have made the decision of implementing EAI projects more attractive. The adoption and acquisition of EAI tools are often the starting point in any EAI project and the success of these are some keys for the overall project success. This paper provides a quality model for EAI tools evaluation that contributes to identify quality criteria, which can be useful in the evaluation and selection processes that an enterprise must make to decide which EAI tools are most suitable to implement.