Generally speaking, BizTalk is for system integration. However, the notion of integration itself is a complex subject. With a variety of computer technologies, platforms, data formats, and standards, integration opens a door into the endless world of solutions. Let's discuss the high-level taxonomy of the integration domain.

Within the spectrum of integration solutions, two major paradigms emerged by early 2000: EII and EAI. Enterprise Information Integration (EII) provides a unified view of enterprise data. The data can be moved into a data warehouse or presented to end users via a federated search in disparate sources. Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) provides message exchange between applications in order to have them work together. In reality, there is always a mixture of these in large systems. Later in the book, we will talk about integration patterns and approaches in detail.

Another term, Business-to-Business (B2B), is also popular...