EII: Let the Debate BeginEII: Let the Debate Begin

Enterprise information integration (EII) is one of the latest acronym buzzwords to crop up in the integration industry. As Tim Matthews, co-founder at Ipedo Inc., contends in his article "A New View on Intelligence," EII fills the gap between application integration (EAI) and integrated presentation tools (portals) by using technology that's quite different from other integration tools. Specifically, a federated query is used to join queries made in disparate applications and put them into a common context. On top of this, he contends that EII provides the perfect foundation for "on-demand intelligence."

On the other side of the fence is Andy Hayler, founder and chief strategist at Kalido. In "EII: Dead on Arrival," Hayler makes the case that using EII as a business intelligence tool is ill advised. Data warehouses and data quality control cannot be avoided, he claims, no matter what kind of data integration approach a company is using.

What's your estimation of EII, particularly as a business intelligence tool? Can you skip the data warehouse? Let us know in the Intelligent Integration Forum.