On June 29th, ebizQ announced the winner of the Application Integration (EAI) and Enterprise Information Integration (EII) Buyers’ Choice Awards (http://www.ebizq.net/webinars/5808.html). The criteria for the awards was developed with the help of hundreds of ebizQ Gold Club members who participated in both a live Webinar and an online survey to define what they consider most important when buying integration technologies. While preliminary standings being reporting on the ebizQ Website were based solely on number of submissions for each vendors, the actual scoring was based on the average raw scores each vendor receives in each category, multiplied by the weight ebizQ members gave to each criterion.

The criteria includes ease of use, technical excellence, flexibility and reuse, maintenance and support, security, support for standards, skills required to implement the solution and ROI. For EAI and EII, ebizQ members stated the most important criteria are ease of use, technical excellence, flexibility and reuse, skills required, and ROI.

From February until April 15, when the polls closed, hundreds of buyers voted for their favorite EAI, EII and SOA vendors. Votes without valid email addresses and those submitted by vendors were not counted.

Interestingly, although the majority of ebizQ members stated that vendor maintenance and support were important but not most important to them in their purchasing decision, it consistently turned out to be a major reason they voted for their favorite vendor. The survey results revealed that while the EII market is not mature at all and is still evolving, the EAI market is mature, and is starting to extend into SOA solutions. It was also clear that buyers are looking for value from IT investments, and they appreciate vendors who enable their success.

ebizQ 2005 EAI Buyer’s Choice Award Winners:

• EAI – webMethods
• EII – Oracle

EAI

The ebizQ Roadmap to Integration Technologies and Buyer’s Guide defines EAI as providing the following integration services:

• Application connectivity
• Intelligent routing
• Translation and transformation
• Mobile integration
• B2B integration

Mobile and B2B integration are special categories of EAI, and can even be considered in categories of their own. However, many EAI vendors offer this capability, and mobile and B2B solutions often rely on the underlying EAI services, so we include them all as one group.