SaaS-based enterprise application integration approach and case study

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has been well studied, and it is being adopted at a very fast pace. Enterprise application integration (EAI) is the key factor in many enterprises. Traditionally, SOA technique can be applied to EAI, especially the application of Web Service. In this paper, we propose that SaaS can also be applied to the field of EAI. Based on this, we propose the SaaS-based EAI approach which rebuilds one analog of legacy applications into SaaS architecture makes the rest applications be configured, and further solves the EAI problem. Besides, we also update the traditional SaaS maturity model, discuss relationships between SOA and SaaS in EAI, and explain how to further integrate SaaS applications by SOA. We implement an Eclipse plug-in which can introduce SaaS capabilities into traditional Web application automatically. Finally, the proposed approach is proved to be effective through a case study.