Costly, Painful and Worth It

Lombardo's statements hint at what Beth Gold-Bernstein, vice presidentof strategic products and services at White Plains, N.Y.-basedconsultancy EbizQ, points out as the greater benefits of EAI providingmanagement of and real-time visibility into business processes acrossthe company and across interactions with business partners. With EAIin place, companies can use a graphical tool to model work processessuch as order fulfillment. Change those processes by pointing andclicking, and the EAI software will reflect those updates correctly inits code for routing or transforming data. "You can continue to usethe existing investment [in applications] underneath this EAI layer,[since it is] already working and managing the transactions but use EAIto change processes and reduce cycle times," saysGold-Bernstein.