A FEW YEARS BACK THERE WAS MAINFRAME legacy. Today there is the ERP legacy. Companies have deployed many enterprise packages and are yet to extract value out of them. The idea-rich, cash-crunched CIO today is looking at easier ways of integrating the enterprise packages that exists in his company. This throws up an enormous opportunity for Indian IT service providers, who have established the ‘offshorabilty’ of EAI services,” says Kalyana Rao, Chief Technology Officer of Satyam Computer Services.

He speaks about the largest EAI project he has undertaken that thousands of adapters, hundreds of brokers, interfaces to more than 50 applications, EAI operations interface management, 80-120 events and more than 1000 concurrent users per portal. According to a recent Gartner Dataquest report, the global EAI services market was worth $56 billion, and this is expected to grow to $98 billion at a CAGR of 15 percent over the next two to three years.

Alliances
To grab a piece of this cake, the top-tier Indian IT service players have formed alliances with leading EAI vendors. For instance Satyam has allied with Tibco, Vitria and Iona. CTOs like Rao believe that it is vital to have partnerships and strong alliances with the EAI vendors to keep abreast of the EAI products, due to the rapid pace at which the market is moving.

Krishnan Ramanjan, global practice head of E-Commerce & EAI, Tata Consultancy Services, claims that there is no company in the world that can boast of the level of strategic partnership that TCS has with WebMethods. What he means is that TCS’ jointly developing EAI product and solutions for specific industry verticals with WebMethods places the company in a separate league, bringing in a major chunk of revenue, besides acting as consulting wing of WebMethods.

Whenever quick fixes or new adapters are needed, especially in a real-time implementation, the product-vendor partnership guides the implementation partner about the availability of such solutions.