The Future of EUS

Abstract

Firms first introduced electronic data interchange (EDI) in the commercial sector in the 1980s to support document exchange in the transportation sector. EDI systems have since achieved critical mass in many other sectors including manufacturing, retail, healthcare, and banking. While EDI systems have seen many improvements, firms rarely addressed EDI integration needs holistically across the full range of application and process integration challenges they face. The advent of comprehensive integration solutions (CISes) is changing this situation, and firms are now able to address their EDI needs along with their application and process integration requirements in one solution. Application development and delivery professionals should review their EDI capabilities and upgrade them as needed to provide a holistic and complete integration environment, to capture the cost advantages of taking this more integrated approach.