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In the past several years there have been several technologies attempting to solve to these problems such as Enterprise Applicaton Integration (EAI) 1, Business-to-Business (B2B) 2, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) 3, and Web Services 4. These solutions addressed some of the integration issues, but were proprietary, expensive, and time-consuming to implement. These solutions range from expensive solutions from vendors (cost, lock-in) to home-grown custom solutions (maintenance, cost). The overwhelming disadvantages of these solutions are cost and lack of flexibility due to being non-standard.
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