Under the pressure of a competitive business environment and due to increasing dependence on technology, the need of integrating disparate applications into a unified set of business processes has appeared as a priority. The solution is offered by Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), providing a flexible and robust integration framework, with a minimum impact on the applications and the way an organization does business. EAI is a set of technologies that focuses on the business issues that allow the exchange of information between different applications and business processes existing either inside or outside an organization. EAI provides the integration of various applications so that they may share information and processes, answering for requirements of a business environment oriented to more mobility and the need of getting information from various location. The aim of this work is to survey the EAI components, EAI architectures, technologies used to connect enterprise applications and benefits of EAI versus traditional middleware. Results are presented for a work study: „the banking front-office and back-office integration”.