One of the most significant challenges that businesses have traditionally faced is the integration of various system components throughout the enterprise. Over the past year, EAI (enterprise application integration) has emerged as a popular approach for integrating systems and gaining a strategic advantage in the marketplace. A corporation that has successfully integrated their internal systems is better positioned to take advantage of the opportunities that emerge following this effort. A financial services firm, for example, could profit from 'cross-selling' products and services that in the past may have been tied to monolithic, proprietary systems that were incapable of sharing information. Tool vendors such as NEON, IBM and BEA have enabled businesses to take advantage of EAI using technologies such as message brokering, MOM, CORBA, COM and others.