Today it would be impossible for an organization to live without technology. Little by little, new systems and applications have been incorporated into work routines and procedures that have not been slow to demonstrate their benefits.. Despite this, more and more companies realize that have reached a point where business application integration to keep advancing. Technologies of different nature and applications that run in different business units with a varied technological base coexist under the same firewall, and out of it, becoming the integration goal as a priority.
Photo credits: istock v_alex
Advantages of business application integration
Make the decision to take the step and work towards it business application integration, involves numerous business benefits, among which it should be noted:
- Access to data in real time between applications.
- Simplification and optimization of business processes, which improves the efficiency of the company by reducing the time to market.
- Information integrity.
- Development and maintenance of much simpler and cheaper systems.
- Improved customer relationships.
- Better cooperation between supply chain components.
- Benefits also derived from legacy applications, that thanks to the business application integration they stay alive.
- Greater business adaptability, better respond to changing current and future business needs.
Solutions for business application integration
Business application integration It can be done in four different ways, depending on the level you want and in which you can work:
- At the data level: The procedure would begin with the transfer of data from one warehouse to another, including information processing, when necessary. The main advantage of this approach is that no code change occurs, which saves the cost of operation, which boils down to a data migration coming from different silos to a central repository.
- At the application interface level: with this approach, access both business process interfaces and data. Applications can be grouped, what enables share business logic and the data, even when always complying with the specific characteristics of the configuration of the interfaces of each application. This approach is mainly used to integrate application packages.
- At the method level: It is a more complex and less effective way of tackling the problem of lack of integration. To share business logic, It is recommended that different applications can enter the same method, each of them, at the same time, can enter other methods. There are many alternatives to achieve this, including distributed objects, application servers and reuse of existing applications to create new applications, among other. Although This approach succeeds in reducing development efforts, loses effectiveness due to technological and human limitations, and also due to the different needs of users in connection with integration.
- User Level: This solution has been in use for a long time and, even though it is not the most recommended alternative, is one more alternative. It is based on a dashboard reorganization to integrate different apps together, working directly on user interfaces.
To these solutions it is convenient to add integration middleware, that works as an intermediary between application servers, distributed objects and distributed agents, based on method exchange, providing a reliable and increasingly widespread integration framework.
In practice, business application integration generally based on a combined approach which uses many different technological solutions for a better result.
Challenges Associated with Business Application Integration
The business application integration it is a complex task and its procedure may increase in difficulty if problems occur That:
- The tech skills shortage and limited business skills.
- Confuse the business application integration with a product, when in reality it is an architecture.
- Negligence security related issues.
- Don't think about him performance relevance when looking for an integration solution.
- Lack of planning of an adequate supervision and control system.
- Lack of an integration strategy or understand this procedure as part of some other project, which is supposed to be a larger entity.
- Insufficient communication.
- Lack of data governance.
