When a company is getting started, the first software usually purchased is for accounting and billing purposes. Once the company starts to grow and the number of employees increases, there are usually more software purchases like payroll or time and attendance solutions. As time goes on, these multiple disconnected systems often create issues ranging from audit and compliance to reduced flexibility for the business, and can ultimately hinder growth.
Application Integrations are becoming increasingly crucial because there is no one-stop solution for all the needs of an enterprise. There are multiple speciality applications that cater to various needs and requirements. Although having specialized software helps in easing the burden of a few departments, reconciliation and reconnaissance of data remains a challenge that organizations have to face. This is where the use of application integration middleware steps in. It helps to maintain, manage and keep all the applications updated while reducing data redundancy.
When you create an integrated application network, allowing applications within an enterprise to interact with one another, all your business and work procedures can be performed more proficiently.
What is Enterprise Application Integration?
Application integration is a process that enables the consolidation and sharing of data, resources, and processes among an organization’s different applications. It can be viewed as the improvement and combination of workflows and data across various applications. The main aim of this is to improve operational and business efficiently. However, enterprise application integration particularly focuses on communicating between various systems. This is achieved by enterprise application integration tools.
Generally this uses Middleware applications to transfer resources between applications.
Using a code-free middleware with visual UI can make your enterprise application integration process more efficient, particularly when you are handling several applications. The benefit of integration is that it eliminates the need to manually enter data into each of your applications, simplifying enterprise data sharing between your most critical applications. An advantage of integration middleware is that it can be on-premise or cloud-based, depending on your business requirements. Now that we understand what enterprise application integration is, let’s move forward to the types of application integration.
Common Approaches for Integrating Applications
There are two conventional approaches or types of enterprise application integration:
The first approach involves manually coding applications to ensure they can “talk” to one another in a commonly understandable language.
The second method involves using an enterprise-ready application integration solution that transforms and integrates data into the required format in a code-free environment. These solutions require minimal reliance on IT teams.
While both these approaches form the fundamental aspect of any effective application integration network, the second type of application integration is considered better as it is more scalable and can account for growing volumes easily. Manually writing codes to integrate an increasing number of application servers can be time-consuming and error-prone.
Nonetheless, in both cases, data access, analysis, and transformation are imperative for application integration. Because if an application is unable to transfer and comprehend data from another application, inconsistencies can arise and cause delays in business processes. Hence, whatever type of application integration your organization uses, the end goal is to be able to connect applications to each other for analytical purposes.
Why Enterprises Choose Application Integration?
Most companies use enterprise applications like billing systems, ERPs, CRMs, and several others to streamline their business processes, such as sales and operations planning, inventory management, etc. Today, cloud-based and mobile applications offer an easy way for enterprises to execute jobs.
However, these types of applications don’t always offer the most innovative solution to business problems on their own. In a scenario like this, it becomes essential for companies to leverage different system integration points. Enterprise application integration solutions can be used to integrate data between existing and new apps.
Advantages of Enterprise Application Integration
Some of the main benefits of enterprise application integration are stated as follows:
Eliminate Data Silos
Applications designed by different vendors do not have the ability to communicate with each other without using additional technology. Integration technology acts as a glue between various enterprise applications, whether they are on-premise or cloud. Therefore, the benefit of integration is the elimination of data silos that occur when an information system or subsystem is unable to connect. Data silos slow down business operations and prevent effective sharing of data; as a result, it remains isolated within every system.
Using an enterprise application integration solution eliminates data silos and enables productive use of data.
Faster Time-to-Market
Businesses often fail to generate a higher ROI because of delays in technology deployment. By integrating various applications, companies can fast-track their business processes, reduce time-to-market, and boost their ROI.
Irrespective of the application and data format, by utilizing enterprise application integration tools companies can incorporate and convert data according to the appropriate specifications along with eradicating the tiresome manual procedures that often plague the addition of a new business system or product.
Process Automation
Depending on the industry, business procedures can diverge significantly. Enterprise application integration helps facilitate smooth data transfer among all kinds of systems and workflows to support productivity and automation.
Data Visibility
Enterprise application integration facilitates point-to-point integration and augmented data visibility that empowers businesses to observe, measure, and embrace the data all through the workflow.
Moreover, you can utilize data to effortlessly address customer expectations and acquire a broad view of business activities.
Interoperability
By integrating different applications, users can get a holistic view of enterprise data by providing users an integrated interface to access functionality and data of various platforms. Thus, creating interoperability between complementing systems, both old and new.
Challenges to Application Integration
Application integration is often a challenging process. This is particularly true if you are integrating old applications with new ones
A frequently ignored aspect of this type of integration is related to applications that are firmly connected with other systems, such as ERP applications. They are not only connected but are reliant on one another to support a particular process. These applications become particularly challenging to integrate, and don’t often respond well to updates and changes, which cause IT integration issues. IT department also uses different types of system integrations. As a result, these integrations are fragile and expensive to maintain. This is where application integration solutions come into play and simplify integration.