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F E A T U R E

Review: EAI Systems Bring IT Together

January 21, 2002
By Eric Sanchez, Dan Beery and Joshua Shehab

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How We Evaluated EAI Products


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We invited each vendor to submit its product for a two-day, hands-on assessment at the Doculabs facility in Chicago. We began the evaluation by having each vendor provide background information on its product's positioning, value proposition, architecture and functionality.

Our test scenario consisted of an integration strategy for a fictional health-insurance company, BOD Healthcare, which was the result of a merger between two HMOs. The vendors developed portions of the sample integrations in advance, and our analyst team completed other portions in our labs (including connecting an SAP system to PeopleSoft products and an application server). The hands-on laboratory assessment gave us a chance to exercise each product's capabilities, and administration and development ease.

The setup also let us judge each product against our predefined criteria for EAI products, which includes dozens of line items in high-level categories -- performance and reliability characteristics, security, integration, administration, development, process management and standards compliance.

Although we evaluated features that contribute to performance (such as load-balancing, caching and database-connection approach), we did not conduct any performance benchmarking as part of our assessment.