There are literally thousands of different hardware and software vendors out there, each offering their own unique products and solutions that do something. At any given time, any organization will be using any number of these offerings. In a situation where data comes from one source, being manually updated in another, consumed by a third, and reported on in a fourth product, each of which having its own proprietary platforms, standards, and protocols, it is imperative to allow these products talk to each other, i.e. integrate.
The solution comes as a set of industry standard middleware technologies that are platform and product independent, and can provide different systems and areas with an opportunity to seamlessly integrate with others, thus providing you with a well operating organization.
The only thing that is constant, especially in business, is change. In recent years, the pace of change has accelerated exponentially, and in order to keep up, organizations must be increasingly adaptable and agile in the face of fast-evolving technologies and standards, changes in markets, customer base and behaviors, and continuous juggling of technology vendors and service providers who seem to be changing owners faster than anyone can keep up. That is not to mention everyday business changes and challenges that any organization faces.
Every vendor and service provider (including internal IT and IS teams) offer something different. New technologies that do things differently (or in a completely new way) appear every day. And it does not make much sense to replace entire applications, systems, or infrastructures based on one new development (especially considering that in a month or so something else will come up). So, an organization ends up with a number of products or services that, while providing their own unique benefits, are not able to work together because of different standards, platforms, or protocols.
Integration can help that. By integrating separate, but related systems, an organization can introduce new functionality that was not available in each of the original solo systems, thus improving efficiency of use for each of the systems, and potentially extending their lifespan by finding new uses. In addition to that, integration can reduce or eliminate errors and omissions that plague manual data exchanges, as well as to provide faster and more reliable means of retrieving and managing data.
Integration of disparate systems most of the time requires some type of automation, such as importing or exporting of data, automated generation of integration calls, creation of reports or automation of workflow steps. As part of our solution suite, we offer Automation services, and you can read more about them here.