Investing in multiple software solutions is commendable, as they offer a unique set of functions and skills to businesses. But, just as too many cooks spoil the broth – having excessive software misaligns the working of your day-to-day operations. Instead of focusing on core work, employees juggle from one software to another to harness the power of technology.
To cut your employees’ slack and get the best of both(or more) worlds, your organization should undertake application integration. Application integration fosters an organization’s infrastructure and business intelligence and creates operational efficiencies when done correctly. But, just like a team is better than the sum of its parts – integrated systems work sparingly well than their separate counterparts.
Application integration is the process of connecting individual applications – each designed for fulfilling a specific purpose – to work with each other. Application integration is the essence of your business strategy because when your applications integrate and communicate with one another, your business can operate in innovative ways.
Benefits of Application Integration
By now, you might clearly understand what Application Integration is and how it works. Now, let’s deep dive into its benefits for your company’s smooth operation and growth.
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- 1. Amplified customer experience
Application Integration is crucial if you want to fasten up your redressal system. Good customers rely on your team’s agility in responding to customers’ feedback. Sure, it is practically impossible that the employees will be there near the desk to answer your question 24×7. But, with Application Integration, businesses can overcome this challenge and enhance the customer experience.
Through an API-led Application Integration, easily connect systems across your enterprise and provide a highly productive digital experience for your customers – increasing brand loyalty and engagement.
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- 2. Simplified IT processes
Providing simplified and uncomplicated technology to your customers is an impeccable opportunity for your organization to instil customer loyalty, eventually leading to more customers. And Application Integration is your go-to system for that.
Through Application Integration, it’s easy for users to access data from anywhere and at any time. In addition, businesses can also serve data to their potential customers, making it a win-win for both parties!
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- 3. Concurrent processing
Concurrent processing includes the performance of multiple processes doing similar work concurrently. Businesses need not wait for one process to get over before starting the other. All the operations of similar nature run simultaneously.
For instance, the ability to process different or the same order processes like quality lookups, backend operation, and order-to-cash transactions can happen simultaneously. This feature facilitates the handling of multiple orders and batch processing wherever required.
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- 4. Business scalability
An integration platform supports a variety of applications required to skyrocket your business in innovative ways through the use of technology. Application connectors mean business operations don’t have to begin from scratch on every new integration. Instead, they can scale rapidly by connecting to a new source of revenue or expanding their current operations.
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- 5. Improves data visibility
By utilizing enterprise application integration, businesses can monitor data and activities throughout the system. This system enables developers to detect emerging risks, measure performance, and make real-time adjustments. They can remove all the data visibility hurdles and make all the data-centric operations function seamlessly. With increased data visibility, companies can also improve operational output and efficiency.
Challenges of Application Integration
When done correctly, the benefits of application integration far outweigh its challenges. But, some of the common challenges companies encounter while implementing application integration projects are:
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- 1. No process automation
Organizations that lack adequate mapping capabilities and data transformation cannot accept and transfer partner data efficiently, and the application operates outside the automated data process. This challenge hampers real-time data availability, and the business cannot expeditiously respond to customers’ feedback and demands.
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- 2. Cumbersome process
Conducting one-off integrations takes enormous time for onboarding and consuming an application, which requires specific skill sets to maintain. Additionally, these custom-built integrations can slow down the data flow, hinder partner relationships, throw transaction errors, and affect business growth massively. Therefore, it is advisable to emphasize your periodic and frequent integrations to make the entire process less cumbersome.
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- 3. Inaccessible data
For most businesses, Application integration is a constant process rather than a quick fix. Through the integration, some stored information is still inaccessible to those who could benefit from it.
It happens due to two reasons:
* Parts of data are stored on-premises in legacy databases or older applications.
* Cloud applications are not effectively connected – leaving business data scattered across different islands within the cloud.
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- 4. Collaboration obstacles
Getting all users that require access to the business app to be on the same can be difficult. Users might have different locations, making communication a pressing issue at times. Onboarding a consultant might help in this situation. But since application integration is supposed to make your operations smooth, persuading all your stakeholders to get to that point is a tough nut to crack.
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- 5. Complexity
The true essence of Application Integration is not just about connecting one app to another. It is about enabling vigorous business processes and automating existing ones. There is a lot of backend operation that goes into it. You can’t just integrate Salesforce with Dropbox and call it a day. You need to understand what exactly happens to your data, how it transforms, the processes involved, and its aligned activities like creating new integrations, editing them or transferring ownership. It looks simple but gets frustrating at times.
5 Application Integration trends to look for in 2022
The trends of Application Integration change each year. All of them vary in terms of functionality and complexity. Some of the trends are:
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- 1. Real-time Application Integration
Though Enterprise Application Integration has been in use for a long time, businesses are only beginning to witness its benefits. Application Integration platforms play a central role in enabling organizations to break down their structure and enhance processes through real-time data exchange. In addition, application Integration offers the functionality of automation and scalability, making the business operations more agile.
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- 2. Hybrid Integration platforms
Data is often regarded as an in-house asset simply because it offers greater accountability and control to the organization. However, conventional methods like legacy integration solutions are unsuitable for fulfilling enterprises’ needs. And that’s when hybrid integration platforms come into play. In 2022, 65% of large-scale organizations have deployed HIP for their business transformation. HIP offers tools to develop and govern customized integration frameworks for meeting the complex requirements of business use cases.
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- 3. Empowered and productive users
With the IT and data revolution, organizations cannot expect the same level of proficiency as implementation errors are bound to occur. The trend in this scenario is the implementation of integrated platforms to build with utmost ease. A low-code integration solution can help users create integrations – anytime and anywhere, creating synergies among employees and unlocking their hidden productivity levels.
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- 4. B2B integration
Focusing solely on the customer side of the business may be a business fallout. Not to mention the frustration of B2B partners for increasing their workload through ineffective frameworks. Therefore, B2B integration facilitates faster partner onboarding, business transactions, and real-time supply chain visibility for a robust business ecosystem.
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- 5. Support spatial data
When companies adopt a new integration framework, they make decisions based on the future. Therefore, they need to tame the available data and make crucial business decisions. With integration platforms, this big data can be distilled with faster data processing and a no-code interface, eventually saving more time and money.
Conclusion
As businesses implement modernization initiatives, improving how your company perceives the available application is the key to rest assured that they sustain in this vast ecosystem of apps and services. It is acceptable that not every software needs to be connected. But, at a certain point, every business should scrutinize its applications and integrate them for better agility, productivity, and optimum time utilization.
If you want your business to attain next-level proficiency, select Application Integration and make your business rise above the level of success and glory. We at AAR Tech help you build effective and user-friendly solutions that can easily integrate with any of your application to achieve your business goals and tick off those on-paper business goals.
