To remain competitive organizations are lining up into virtual alliances, with integrated value chains, introducing competition between, rather than within supply chains. A crucial requirements of virtual alliances, and their supporting, integrated enterprise application is their ablility to move fast and quickly adapt to business-induced change. This paper combines theories from the area of Complex Adaptive Systems (CASs), that has been successfully applied to explain the adaptive behavior of biological systems, with research from the research arena of enterprise application integration that is based on a variety of distributed business object technologies. In particular, this paper investigates whether successful EAI implementations conform to the CAS properties by reviewing three case studies that apply business object technology. These concepts can organize our discussion of business object systems and inform our understanding of the success factors for designing integrated enterprise applications, since the most effective integration is often the result of ifcapturingl, software from foreign systems, a common phenomenon in CAS systems.