To keep up with business trends and growing customer demands, organizations must have the ability to quickly respond to change. However, to do so, an effective enterprise architecture is required. One which will enable a seamless flow of information between all departments. Our enterprise application development integration solution practice (EAI) helps clients deal with business integration. Most IT systems are made up of diverse elements – different and often non-compatible hardware, operating systems and software applications. Common problem areas include, for example, applications running on different platforms, written in different languages and deployed in different locations; or data files of different types, held in different sites and accessed in different ways. A major challenge for IT specialists in addressing business integration is managing this diversity.

Application integration can be categorized into three types:

Manual Application Integration

Manual application integration requires people to act as the interface between applications and enables the integration between them. This form of application integration is very common. As an example, think of a customer service department that collects information from the public. People may require the same information to be collected in multiple systems and may want to read information from those systems to respond to customer requests. In other cases, a person may need to obtain customer information from one database, and then re-enter it into another database used for another purpose.

This form of integration requires very little technological investment. It becomes more complex, however, as your organization becomes more complex and larger in size, as this process is accompanied by the growth in size and increased complexity of data used by your organisation. Thus, this can possibly lead to inaccuracy of the data. . Also as the number of applications increases, you will require more people to maintain such an environment. An environment that relies heavily on manual integration is generally very inefficient, Solution Lions can help you deal with this problem.

Semi-Automated Application Integration

Semi-automated application integration combines manual integration with a certain degree of automation. The client may be involved in an area where the corresponding automated solution is too difficult or expensive to implement, or where the business requires an employee to make decisions. For example, if your business requires a manager to approve all expense claims. In this case, all steps before and after managerial approval may be automated, but a person is required in the middle of the process. In other cases, employee intervention may be needed to transform data that is required in another system.

Semi-automated application integration generally requires more technological investment, but once that investment is made, the client can often reduce the number of people involved in integrating applications. Reducing human involvement in this manner usually reduces costs and increases reliability.

Fully Automated Application Integration

Fully automated application integration removes people from the business process entirely, although they are required to maintain the system. This type of integration consists of applications communicating through a series of interfaces and adapters. For example, two databases might share data, which is automatically transformed and committed to the second database from the first with no human interaction.