Organizations need to integrate business processes across a large number of disparate applications in order to drive revenue growth, increase productivity, and gain visibility into business performance. The velocity of business is accelerating and only by integrating and streamlining their business processes can organizations achieve the agility to respond to fast-changing customer and market demands in real time. The integration imperative is even more pressing as supply and demand chains have become increasingly interdependent, requiring organizations to integrate the extended enterprise to make sure the viability of their entire partner ecosystems.

To meet these requirements, Siebel Systems has pioneered Universal Application Network. To integrate Siebel Business Applications into the Universal Application Network, Siebel Systems continues to enhance the integration tool set within Siebel applications—Siebel Enterprise Application Integration (Siebel EAI).

This chapter consists of the following topics:

• About the Universal Application Network
• About Siebel EAI
• About Unicode Support and Siebel EAI
• About Legacy Encapsulation
• About Peer-to-Peer Integration
• About Connecting Applications Using Integration Servers
• About Other Integration Strategies
• About the Components of Siebel EAI
• About Siebel EAI
• About Preconfigured Integration Solutions
• About Application Services Interfaces
• About Web Services