I read recently that a tech vendor had "the largest market share in financial services", which seemed really impressive if it wasn't for the superscript number indicating there was a qualifier in the footnotes.  "Ranking applies only to pure-play EAI vendors," it read.  Oh, of course, EAI.  Whoops, I mean, what exactly is EAI?

According to whatis.com:

EAI (enterprise application integration) is a business computing term for the plans, methods, and tools aimed at modernizing, consolidating, and coordinating the computer applications in an enterprise. Typically, an enterprise has existing legacy applications and databases and wants to continue to use them while adding or migrating to a new set of applications that exploit the Internet, e-commerce, extranet, and other new technologies. EAI may involve developing a new total view of an enterprise's business and its applications, seeing how existing applications fit into the new view, and then devising ways to efficiently reuse what already exists while adding new applications and data.

Translation:  it's middleware.  And I know middleware isn't the easiest thing to understand, so let's just say EAI is the way you get data in and out of mainfranes (legacy systems) when you want to do something cool with those legacy systems like get them connected to the Internet.

"Pure-play middleware vendor" is an interesting concept though, since most middleware has grown as an extension of one of the connected systems.  I suppose this term is used to keep Oracle and Microsoft out of the comparisons with this firm, since Oracle dabbles in ERP and Microsoft meddles in everything.

Tags: EAI, middleware, you learn something new everyday