Overview: Siebel Enterprise Application Integration > Custom EAI Business Scenarios >

Determining Your Integration Needs

Sometimes the best way to determine your integration needs is to study examples of similar problems faced by other organizations. This chapter presents three scenario categories, each with a number of permutations. The categories are:

• About Data Access and Replication
• About Data Across the Enterprise
• About Performing Data Transformation

The first step in getting started on an integration project is to identify your integration needs. Siebel Business Applications provide solutions for a variety of business needs. They play a key role in the application environment, in which you might use other applications such as back-office solutions for order fulfillment, manufacturing, or accounting; e-commerce applications such as Web storefronts; help desk applications; and mainframe-based applications that store millions of customer transactions.

As customer applications, Siebel Business Applications need to interact with these external systems to provide an integrated view of your information. Siebel EAI provides the tools as well as prebuilt components that you can use to create this integration. There are several ways in which you can approach integration, depending on your needs:

• You can connect Siebel applications and your back office or e-commerce system, using prebuilt EAI connectors.
• You can integrate Siebel applications with middleware solutions.
• You can integrate Siebel applications with external applications, using a third-party EAI product.