Business Process Integration

BPI is a software solution that enables business to integrate internal applications, connect with business partners over the Internet, and automate business processes.
BPI solutions help organizations to reduce operational and administrative costs, retain and increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, and provide business agility.

Need for BPI

Organizations can acquire a competitive edge through the effective use of technology which can help the organization to:

• access data residing on disparate systems and applications.
• deliver timely business information to information workers.
• provide end-to-end transaction visibility. 
• integrate trading partners into business process through automated interaction with this systems.
• Expose new functionality, such as a new process or an enhanced business rule to suppliers and customers.

Business Drivers of BPI

Three common scenarios of BPI solutions include:

• Enterprise Application Integration(EAI)
• B2B Integration
• Customer self-service portals

This solutions focus on automating business process and connecting applications to exchange business information.
EAI integrates the internal application and systems of an organization.
A B2B solution help connect an organization's systems with external systems of partners vendors and customers.
Customer self-service portals enables an organization to share information with customers, employees, or trading partners by using web-based protals which display information from various systems. 

Key business drivers that could influence the decision to opt for BPI solutions: 

• Partners, industry , and government standards and policies for sharing order, payment, account, and forcast information across organizations are rigorous.
• Customer service expectations for faster and greater access to information, such as comprehensive view of account status, are increasing.
• Multibransh or multistore operations drive the requirement to integrate systems.
• Reducing supply chain costs and lag times by sharing information across the supply chain is required to stay competitive.
• Midmarket organizations  that are committed to an ERP system or have mission-critical applications face challenges of having these systems talk to each other.
• Mergers and acquisitions are driving the need to integrate systems and applications.
• Desire to extend the value of existing infrastructure to automate and coordinate processes to create more business flexibility.

source: Microsoft web site selling BizTalk server.