Gone are the days when organizations relied solely on either on-premise systems or cloud computing. On the contrary, organizations employ a combination of both approaches today.
Application integration helps companies connect on-premise and cloud applications to transform and orchestrate data essential for driving business workflows. It enables companies to streamline the practice of sharing business data and processes among myriad applications within an ecosystem. The role of these applications lies in addressing a multitude of business needs; it can be anything from finance, ERP systems to CRM and e-commerce platforms.
Application integration tool helps enterprises establish a connection between their SaaS and on-premise applications with enterprise architecture, thereby promoting communication and eliminating data silos.
Enterprise Application Concept:
The application integration platform is designed to reduce the gap between several computer programs to a minimum. Apart from that, it enables employees to manage large streams of data by relying on simple interfaces. The primary goal of the enterprise application integration tool is to allow effective data usage generated from different sectors of an organization.
There are a number of applications that can be integrated using this tool such as.
- Supply Chain Management (SCM)
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
- Human Resources
- Business Intelligence
- E-commerce systems
All these programs can be categorized as software as a service i.e. SaaS. Research by Gartner indicates that almost 75% of enterprises offering services related to IT tend to employ around 6 applications on average. Thus, using enterprise application integration platforms is more important than before.
Enterprises Application Approaches:
Application integration has different meanings for different companies. Based on the use case, integration tool, and data pattern, companies can use different approaches of application integration including point-to-point, open-source, and custom-built. No matter what the end goal is, enterprises can pick an application approach out of others. Here are some of the most common EAI approaches.
SaaS Application Integration
During recent times, enterprises have access to hundreds of SaaS applications at the same time. Salesforce, a popular SaaS system, CRM or NetSuite ERP, a cloud-based technology, can serve as effective data management tools. However, there remains the need to integrate it into the organization’s architecture that helps in avoiding data silos and black boxes. In such cases, iPaaS offers a befitting solution.
On-Premise Application Integration
Acting as a home-grown ERP, on-premise application integration systems help companies leverage their ESB. Empowering a middleware platform such as an enterprise service bus allows companies to route as well as transform messages and enable communication between applications. This approach has replaced custom-coding.
Application to Application Integration
Application to application fits best for companies that are in the quest of end-to-end processing and comprehensive visibility into critical business processes. For example, companies shifting their gears from being an e-commerce giant to a physical digital store can make use of the application to application integration. They can use this integrated approach to integrate e-commerce data workflows with the ERP fulfillment processes. This approach helps companies to streamline their B2B and EDI data exchange workflows, thus enabling automation, increasing efficiency, and minimizing manual intervention.
The type of approach an enterprise uses to implement integration will depend on the overall goals and the intricacy of the IT infrastructure.
Application Integration Perks:
Enterprise application integration offers a multitude of benefits including,
- Easy Managing and sharing of data: Enterprise application integration streamlines interoperability, meaning communication between various departments of the organization is enhanced. Facts say, in the US alone, interoperability discrepancies have incurred losses worth up to USD 1 billion which is huge. With the aid of an enterprise application software solution, companies can access entire information collected by business applications without delay – eradicates data processing responsibilities completely.
- Business workflows are automated: Business processes taking place in an organization vary greatly. The role of a flexible enterprise application integration software comes into play here. It allows companies to support the seamless handoff of data among all the systems and workflows as well as enhance the transparency of financial flow. The reusable template feature of the enterprise application integration tool saves countless hours on onboarding and other partner configuration procedures. In addition, this tool triggers application events and send alerts for proactive troubleshooting and integrated communications.
- New opportunities are created: An important feature of EAI is that it helps managers get information about new opportunities and gives them solutions too. The turnaround time of this process is extremely small. With this, companies can address market shifts efficiently, manage their reputation management issues, supply chain disruption issues and more – all from a single interface.
- Efficiency is increased: Using enterprise application integration helps in fostering communication, reducing time and effort, and improving functionality and control to bolster the overall efficiency of the organization. To add, it allows enterprises to determine and respond to fresh opportunities. Enterprise application integration tool plays a major role in helping companies address the changing market paradigms, consequences of disruption, and more.
- IT infrastructure turns flexible: Application integration software enables companies to develop IT facilities that meet the growing expectations of consumers in an easy and timely manner. Communication has always been an issue within an enterprise. Organizations need to face many challenges that arise primarily when the employees are not enough tech-savvy. Such employees face troubles in managing the structure which is IT based. While smaller organizations can deal with such issues, bigger organizations require an application integration software to take care of the IT structure in the enterprise where they are not able to utilize innovative technologies optimally. This tool, with an easy to use interface, helps companies to overpower these barriers, thereby streamlining the business processes and offering better functionality.
Application integration tool lets organizations realize the advantages of their investments all-inclusive. It is rapidly gaining traction on a global front. Not only it enhances organizational proficiencies, but it also improves an individual’s performance with essential features like employee records and rewards. This tool is beneficial to a variety of firms including, network providers, transportation and logistics companies, bank, and retail organizations.
Nevertheless, the only end concern is to choose a reputable integration vendor. With so many integration vendors in the market, picking one is daunting. Adeptia’s integration software delivers all the functionalities, makes businesses easier to do business with, fast-forwards revenues, increases IT productivity, and more.
