Today’s businesses rely heavily on numerous applications to streamline operations, increase productivity and boost growth. As organizations need more applications, there has been a substantial increase in the usage of software as a service (SaaS) applications.
According to a recent report; the average number of SaaS applications utilized globally by businesses has risen from 8 in 2015 to 110 in 2021- a staggering 1,300% growth in only six years! And this doesn’t even consider the on-premises applications companies use in their legacy systems.
Application integration plays a pivotal role in ensuring that communication and interaction between various applications run seamlessly. This process involves harmonizing different software applications, systems, and services to function together effortlessly.
This allows businesses to gain an all-inclusive and integrated view of their data and processes. Integration of applications can resolve data silos and redundancies in data; making it more convenient for applications to exchange information and offer the business more sophisticated features and insights.
What is application integration?
“Application integration” refers to how your programs share information and call upon one another’s services. Integrating & communicating
amongst your apps is a cornerstone of any digital change plan as it opens up entirely new avenues of business operation.
Applications in a traditional business environment exist in silos, where they are isolated from one another and their data sources within specific departments or divisions. This is problematic because these programs are frequently employed to carry out a business procedure or gain insight into your company’s state. These situations necessitate time-consuming and prone-to-error manual data transfers between unconnected apps.
Benefits of Application Integration
Integration can solve many intricate problems, but what other advantages does it bring? Integration can add substantial value to your organization as a whole and in the day-to-day running of your business, provided you choose the right tool to help you.
Organizational benefits
Integrating your applications across various cloud services is crucial for streamlining your data. However, you need an integration tool that enables the deployment of integration runtimes in multiple clouds so that you can deploy close to your applications. This will result in faster processing times and lower costs, as data will not need to be constantly transferred between different platforms.
Operational Benefits
The correct application tool can also provide significant time and money savings as well as operational benefits that improve performance:
- Access any data anywhere: As businesses expand their application portfolios (e.g., by adopting SaaS apps or developing innovative cloud-based solutions), data becomes more scattered across many environments. Thanks to deploying integration tools across various settings, any system can access data in any format.
- Resolve “endpoint individuality”: Every system or application has unique characteristics that must be considered in every integration. These characteristics include error handling, authentication methods, load management, performance optimization, and more. Integration technologies that take care of these issues “out of the box” produce significant productivity improvements over coding and a better degree of enterprise-class resilience.
- Let integrators focus on integration: Integrators can concentrate more on developing business logic by using tools specifically designed to aid them. An integration tool helps users build integration flows more quickly without necessitating in-depth familiarity with the many platforms and domains by handling fault tolerance, error recovery, log capture, evaluation of performance, message tracking, and transactional update and recovery.
How Does Application Integration Work
By creating connections between distinct applications, application integration enables sharing of data, functions, and processes. The standard procedure for application integration is outlined in the sections below:
Identify integration requirements
Before moving further; companies must evaluate their integration requirements by defining which applications require connection and figuring out the data, functions, and processes that must be shared.
Select an integration method
Point-to-point integration, data integration, function integration, and process integration are a few methods for integrating applications. Businesses must decide which approach best serves their corporate goals and needs.
Establish connections
Connecting applications is an essential step in the integration strategy. To establish these connections; organizations can use middleware tools or custom code. Middleware options like enterprise service buses or integration platforms make this process much more manageable and often have pre-built adapters for popular applications.
Define data mappings and transformations
After connections are established, the organization needs to define data mappings and transformations between applications. Clear data exchange between different systems is essential, so data mappings ensure that all information is compatible. Data transformations may also be necessary to ensure the receiving application can read the data.
Implement integration logic
Businesses must implement integration logic once connections and data mappings are defined. This is where the organization decides how data exchange, function calls, or process execution will occur between the connected applications. Custom code or middleware configuration may be required to achieve the desired outcome.
Common Challenges with Application Integration
SaaS proliferation
The adoption of SaaS applications has increased dramatically. Small and medium-sized organizations discover more inexpensive solutions and apps better suited to their requirements. On the other hand, large organizations have distinct needs that necessitate the deployment of numerous best-of-breed apps.
As a result, several applications must be integrated, with varied degrees of complexity regarding how easy it is to integrate with an application. This puts much strain on IT teams to keep up with the expanding demands.
Integration is cumbersome
Point-to-point and one-off integrations provide an unmanageable jumble of integrations that are challenging to modify if changes to the process are required. Changes to one step in the process could have unforeseen effects on the entire process. This results in either a drawn-out project to modify the integrations or avoiding the modifications altogether, producing inefficiencies.
No automation of processes
Integrating necessitates some level of automation, much like the underlying operations that application integration seeks to automate. Every integration runs the risk of being a one-off integration project without it.
Some templates that may be applied to new integrations have been developed to address this issue, and integration patterns have been defined. There are no guidelines for the optimal techniques for building large-scale integrations, and these procedures are not usually followed.
No automation of processes
Integrating necessitates some level of automation, much like the underlying operations that application integration seeks to automate. Every integration runs the risk of being a one-off integration project without it.
Some templates that may be applied to new integrations have been developed to address this issue, and integration patterns have been defined. There are no guidelines for the optimal techniques for building large-scale integrations, and these procedures are not usually followed.
Not enough technical expertise
Even if a system has a well-documented API; learning how it operates takes a lot of time. Understanding how the APIs function is a problem on more than a technical level. Understanding the importance of the information in relation to the other application and the entire procedure is necessary. The ability to do both is a rare gem.
Conclusion
It is not feasible to approach each integration on a case-by-case basis when the number of applications utilized in organizations is increasing quickly. When introducing a new tool, it is ideal to have a plan that can quickly adapt to your company’s needs. You must have an integration platform to operate at high velocity and carry out this strategy.
This platform should be able to shorten the time it takes to develop each integration and give users of those applications the freedom to integrate on their own rather than having to hire expensive developer resources and go through a drawn-out integration project.