How Application Integration Can Benefit Your Company

Application integration is the method that allows the various applications—each designed for particular purposes—to interact. By integrating and optimizing workflows and data between different software applications, organizations can make integrations that improve their infrastructures and enable flexible business processes.

Application integration bridges the gap between traditional on-premises systems and the rapidly evolving cloud-based application platforms. Through seamless interconnected processes as well as data exchanges, application integration lets enterprises orchestrate different functions across their entire infrastructure and enable businesses to function more efficiently.

Concepts of application integration

If an organization plans to move ahead with application integration services, there are many components required to coordinate processes across two or more applications successfully.

Application Programming Interface (API)

The API is an array of functions and processes that define how software components must work together. APIs allow developers to swiftly and easily access the capabilities of other software by using well-defined data structures. In recent times, they have become a common method to integrate applications, and data integration services.

Actions and events

An event can be defined as an event that occurs in the connected applications you use, for example, receiving a payment. An event then triggers an action or series of actions, which can include standard functionality—like creating, retrieving, or updating datasets—and be application-specific—such as creating a new case in Salesforce.

Data mapping

Data mapping is the name given to the information exchange to be utilized. For instance, when you submit and complete contact forms within one application, that event may trigger actions to connect the fields of your form to different datasets that correspond to them on other applications, categorising the data entered into first name and status, last name, and so on. This helps with exporting data, allowing for more efficient sorting and analysis.

Benefits of application integration

There are many issues that integration can solve; what are the other advantages? Integration is beneficial on both an organisational and an operational level as long as you choose the best tool for integration.

Organizational benefits

Integrating your application across different clouds is a crucial step towards the synchronization of your data. You will require the right integration software that permits the creation of integration runtimes across different cloud providers. This lets you run close to your applications, which results in lower latency time since the process runs directly within the cloud and reduces expenses due to not having to transfer data between and out of the platforms.

Operational Benefits

The right application tool can also yield important timesaving, cost-cutting, and performance-enhancing operational benefits:

• Access any information from anywhere:

  As organizations diversify their applications (e.g., by adopting SaaS applications and creating new solutions using cloud technology), data is being distributed across multiple platforms. Integration tools that run across these environments allow access from any device to any kind or format of information.

• Resolve ‘endpoint individuality.’

  Every system or application has its own unique idiosyncrasies, which should be considered in any integration: error handling and security protocols for authentication, load control performance optimization, and much else. Integration tools that address these issues ‘out of the box’ provide huge improvements in productivity over coding and an increased level of enterprise-class resilience.

• Let integrators concentrate on integration.

  Tools that are purpose-built will allow integrators to focus less on the infrastructure around them and more on developing business logic. Through addressing error recovery as well as log capture, fault tolerance, and analysis of performance messages, tracing, recovering, and updating transactions. An integration tool allows users to build seamless flows without having to have a thorough understanding of various domains and platforms.

Application integration use cases

As more and more companies focus on agile integration strategies, modernising outdated systems is the primary goal. Examples of industry-specific examples include:

• Banking:

  With the integration of the customer’s accounts, loan application services, and other back-end systems into their mobile application, banks can offer services through a brand new digital channel and attract new customers.

• Manufacturing:

  Manufacturing facilities employ hundreds or even thousands of devices to oversee every aspect of production lines. By connecting these gadgets to other systems (e.g., inventories of parts as well as scheduling applications and systems to control processes in the factory), manufacturers will gain information that helps them identify manufacturing issues and improve quality costs, throughput, and quality.

• Healthcare:

  With the integration of the patient’s hospital record into the electronic health records (EHR) technology, everyone who is treating the patient can access the patient’s medical history, and treatment, as well as information from the primary physician, specialists, insurance companies, and many more. When a patient is moved across different departments within the hospital, responsible caretakers are able to easily access the necessary information to help the patient most efficiently.

Organizations in any industry can leverage mission-critical systems through integration services:

ERP systems: The Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems function as the central point of every business activity within the company. Through connecting ERP with other application and applications, businesses can streamline and automate critical business processes, like payments processing, supply chain processes, sales lead tracking, and many more.

CRM Platforms: When combined together with additional tools or services CRM (CRM) systems can increase efficiency and effectiveness by automating many marketing, sales, customer support, and product development processes.