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Q. What is the difference between a SOA and an EIA?

A. Enterprise Integration Architecture (EIA) is a reactive architecture that facilitates integration of applications that were never designed to work together. The primary role of an EIA is typically to synchronize data among all of the disparate systems.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a proactive architecture designed to enable applications to work together when they are deployed. A SOA is designed to provide a single view and way to manipulate common business entities and a single way to define your business processes on top of these regardless of the underlying applications, instead of focusing on synchronizing multiple copies of redundant data.

In practice, architectures usually require a bit of both approaches. It is unlikely that you will fully eliminate redundancy or having processes built into applications if you own and use multiple packaged applications, resulting in the continued need for EAI. On the other hand, where custom applications, web sites, portals, overarching business processes, and other similar applications are concerned, using well-defined services in these applications can dramatically improve your total cost of ownership, your business agility, and time to delivery.