What is EII?
EII is yet another business acronym. It stands for Enterprise Information Integration. At its most basic, EII pulls data from a variety of sources to create a single presentation. This collating of data is read-only, however, not read-and-write. In other words, EII makes temporary copies of all the data it accesses, leaving the original data in the virtual places they reside while transferring “snapshots” of those data to destination systems for reporting purposes of the end user. This virtual caching of the data is perhaps the most unique feature of EII. EII is implemented via the Internet. Unlike other kinds of integration such as EAI, EII allows access to data in three formats: structured, semi-structured, and unstructured. Structured data include server-based collections of information, such as Oracle, SQL Server, and Sybase. Semi-structured data are emails and spreadsheets. Unstructured data are text documents and multimedia presentations, data not easily converted into virtual in
The ARC Research Network in Enterprise Information Infrastructure [EII] is a unique Australian Research Council [ARC] initiative to improve the quality, impact and visibility of Australian ICT research, through networking, collaboration and fostering research opportunities for ICT researchers. EII is funded by the ARC in conjunction with financial support provided by 21 Australian and international institutions. The extent of the research in this area is definitely beyond a single project. EII brings together the best researchers in different aspects of enterprise information infrastructure to make a substantial impact on the most important contemporary ICT goal of providing scalable solutions for globally deployable Enterprise Computing Environments. EII Vision • To provide focus for research exchange via networking and collaboration • To address fundamental ICT research problems • To improve the quality, impact and visibility of Australian ICT research EII Mission To identify and fac
Enterprise Information Integration (EII) refers to technology and business best-practices for the real-time aggregation of corporate data across multiple, potentially widely disparate, data sources. EII delivers comprehensive, reusable “views” of customers, products, employees, and more. By presenting distributed data as if it exists in a single location, EII accelerates the development and maintenance of analytical and composite applications, improving corporate decision-making, customer service, compliance, or operating efficiency. The unified data is exposed via SQL and/or Web Services to business intelligence dashboards, spreadsheets, reports, single-view-type applications, CRM, and/or ERP applications. EII has traditional ties to concepts such as distributed query or virtual database but includes concepts of federation (different vendors) broader data sources (not just relational, but including flat files, XML sources, and applications), broader access (not just SQL), and higher p
Since we are biased towards simplifying technology issues, we often describe the difference between EAI and EII as two halves of the same problem: EAI addressing the somewhat straightforward application connection problem, and EII addressing the more complex integration of the information structures that the applications process. In reality, it is more complicated than that, but the bifurcation is helpful in clarifying differing approaches. EII solutions today should address both application and information integration. In fact, the EAI Consortium has been renamed the Integration Consortium in recognition of this, and you should expect the majority of EAI vendors to come up with an information integration story. In addition to EAI, there are other software categories and analyst concepts, old and new, that are relevant to integrating information, such as Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), the “Real Time Enterprise”, Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL), Enterprise Portals, etc. These re
EII is software that combines heterogeneous data sources at a transactional level (in real time, via “query federation”) in order to support applications that present or analyze the data in new ways. In other words, EII provides a “database veneer” or service that allows administrators, developers, and end-users to treat a …
