Overview: Siebel eBusiness Application Integration Volume l > Overview of Siebel eAI > About the Components of Siebel eAI >

About Siebel eAI Adapters and Connectors

Siebel eAI provides adapters and connectors to help create integrations between Siebel applications and external applications. There are also additional connectors developed by Siebel eBusiness Applications partners.

Siebel Adapters

An adapter is a Siebel eAI component that provides the low-level interface mechanism to allow one application to talk to another. In Siebel eAI, there are two kinds of adapters: the EAI Siebel Adapter and the Transport Adapters.

• The EAI Siebel Adapter is specifically designed to interact with the Siebel business object layer. It is a business service in Siebel applications that can take as input an XML document or a property set that conforms to an integration object definition in the Siebel system. EAI Siebel Adapter can then query, insert or update, delete, or synchronize data with the Siebel business object layer.
• Transport adapters are business services within Siebel eAI that are designed to communicate with other protocols and technologies outside of Siebel applications to transport data from the Siebel system to another system. The HTTP transport in Siebel eAI allows Siebel applications to communicate over the HTTP protocol. The MQSeries adapter allows Siebel applications to communicate with the IBM MQSeries messaging system. The MSMQ adapter allows Siebel applications to communicate with the Microsoft MQ messaging system.

Siebel Connectors

Siebel eAI connectors provide low-level connectivity to other back-office applications such as SAP, but also include the business processes used for connecting to the external application. For example, Siebel Connector for SAP R/3 provides connectivity using BAPI and IDOC transport adapters, as well as predefined business processes. Using the connectors, you can exchange customer, order, and product information between Siebel applications and SAP.

Third-Party Connectors

Your organization may have a need to integrate multiple applications, such as Siebel applications, SAP, Oracle, I2, and so on, with one another. If so, you might need an EAI solution from one of the EAI vendors. These vendors work closely with Siebel Systems to develop adapters to Siebel applications using Siebel eAI. Siebel Systems has a validation program to make sure that these adapters work according to Siebel Systems standards.