Application integration is the process that helps independently designed applications and systems to work together. This can help reduce costs, reveal insights, and create greater efficiencies and capabilities for an organization.
Organizations rarely rely on just a single application, but managing multiple applications—along with all of their data—can be a time-consuming, tedious, and difficult job. For example, a typical large organization can have thousands of different types of applications, such as: packaged applications that customers buy, applications that run on-premises, or applications that are offered as a service (software-as-a-service (SaaS)). Customers are also building their own applications in the cloud. As a result, it can be challenging to manage these different types of applications because they require administrators and resources.
This is where application integration can make a difference. Application integration manages all the integrations between applications in one place, controlling the authentications and authorizations around these integrations.
Without application integration, moving data between applications would be complex and extremely tedious; it would require entering the same data multiple times and would also increase the chance of human error. Application integration connectors have the ability to transform data into a format compatible with an organization’s existing IT architecture so that the data can be entered just one time and connected to multiple applications—without needing to be concerned about whether each application can communicate with each other. This can provide a certain level of flexibility, so that an organization can choose the applications it wants, rather than being forced to buy from a specific vendor.
While the terms “application integration” and “data integration” are occasionally used interchangeably, it’s important to clarify their differences.
In simple terms, data integration consists of gathering information from disparate sources with the goal of creating a more unified view of the data across an organization. While data integration can happen in real time, it can also happen over time because it collects large amounts of data, stores it, and then processes it in batches. This can assist in moving and analyzing data within applications in order to remove redundancies.
Application integration is typically more limited and tied to workflows between applications. For example, passing lead information from a marketing system into a sales management system. This also typically happens on the individual transaction level. Data integration typically happens at the data storage or database level—where entire tables, directories, files, streams, or other data types are aggregated and transformed as needed.
