Distributed Application Integration (DAI) has been proposed as the next step in the EAI process. Once corporations are internally integrated and connected to the business arenas in which they partake, what happens next? As Greg Grosh offered in his September 2001 article for EAI Journal, "Data Imperatives: Patterns in EAI Behavior," DAI addresses the issues of data, their role and their place in the integration processes. More specifically, DAI embodies concepts such as "data supply chain" and 'transaction migration' (wherein "transactions become the integration unit of work rather than a file or database subset," (Grosh 2001:26)). Of importance is the issue of approaching zero latency in the data supply chain. The reduction of latency goes hand-in-hand with process automation as fully fluid business processes become the norm and time lags diminish. The speed of business becomes correlated with the speed of integration.

The advantages of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and Distributed Application Integration (DAI) are particularly relevant to the key processes involved in today's corporations. Specifically, the critical function of real-time information transfer and immediate decision-making are best supported by EAI and DAI abilities to achieve full data/information integration with near zero latency in the data supply chain.

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