What Is Application Integration: Tools, Examples, Best Practices

Your organization utilizes multiple applications to perform different tasks on a daily basis. However, certain conditions might require integrating these applications to automate complex tasks. Integrating applications can enable you to optimize operations, saving resources and time.

This article explains application integration, some common examples, and the best practices for performing the integration process.

What Is Application Integration?

Application integration is the process of connecting different systems and applications designed for specific purposes together to optimize workflow efficiency. Enabling applications to communicate allows you to modernize infrastructure and perform agile business operations.

In traditional business approaches, applications are siloed—disconnected and operating independently. This creates a problem when a scenario arrives where you must utilize multiple applications together to perform specific tasks, requiring manual intervention.

However, for modern businesses, application integration has become a part of daily operations, reducing the barriers between on-premise systems and cloud-based applications.

Purpose of Application Integration

The key purpose of application integration is to streamline application communication, resulting in enhanced performance and efficient time utilization while reducing associated costs.

Here are a few benefits of application integration:

• Integrating applications across on-premise and cloud systems allows you to synchronize data, providing consistency across various platforms.
• With data present in dispersed applications, application integration enables you to build new solutions based on already existing systems.
• Application integration provides pre-built solutions for common integration challenges, such as load balancing, authentication, error handling, etc. It can help you create robust, scalable applications.

Application Integration vs. Data Integration

By now, you must have understood what application integration is. However, there might be a common question that might arise along your application development journey: How is application integration different from data integration?

Let’s look at a brief table demonstrating the common differences between application and data integration.

Use Cases & Examples of Application Integration

Below are some real-world application integration examples:

• Healthcare: Application integration plays an important role in healthcare by integrating patient records with an electronic healthcare application. Integrating data into this application allows physicians and specialists to monitor patient’s health, ensuring timely treatment.‍
• Banking: Banks provide services to their customers by integrating in-house applications containing customer details, loan application services, and other backend features to mobile applications.‍
• Marketing: Integrating CRM, marketing automation, and analytics platforms to optimize campaigns and customer engagement.‍
• Resource Planning: By integrating data from your organization’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system with supporting applications, you can streamline business processes.

Types of Application Integrations

Application integration can be broadly divided into three types:

Data Integration

Data integration involves integrating data from dispersed sources into a single repository, allowing easy access to data. In real-world scenarios, your organization’s data might be dispersed across various sources, losing its value individually.

Integrating this data enables you to gain enriched information by using its collectiveness. One of the most common use cases of data integration is migrating data from a database, applications, or flat files into a data warehouse for analytics and reporting.

Business Level Integration

Business-level integration involves enhancing an organization's efficiency using business automation and artificial intelligence (AI). With so many workflow management apps available, it is becoming challenging to use each one effectively for the best results.

Business-level integration enables businesses to connect multiple applications together, such as a CRM with an account application, to streamline business processes.

Presentation Integration

Presentation integration combines two or more applications with a common user interface. It involves using middleware to combine these applications into a single user interface. In practical scenarios, this integration has become outdated and is rarely used in industries.

Application Integration Architecture & Technologies

This section highlights the architecture and technologies used in application integration.

Point-to-Point

Point-to-point application integrations are customized connections between different applications. In this integration, two systems communicate with the help of APIs or custom codes. Each connection is useful in solving a specific business problem, but as the number of applications increases, the complexity of point-to-point integrations increases.

Hub-and-Spoke

Hub-and-spoke provides a central hub to manage all the data shares and requests, helping you decouple direct connections between the senders and receivers. It simplifies the integration process by encouraging connections through a centralized location and providing advanced security features. Hub-and-spoke integration resolves the scalability issue that you might face while working with point-to-point connections.

iPaaS

Integration Platform as a Service (IPaaS) is a cloud service that allows you to integrate applications and processes. It is a modern form of application integration that provides cloud-based application integration tools and publishing capabilities with API and data management functions. IPaaS offers pre-built connectors for various applications, including SaaS and on-premise applications, that can help you streamline application integration.

APIs

Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs, are a set of protocols that enable applications to connect to each other, allowing the exchange of data and features. It exposes only the necessary information, securing the sensitive information of any application, which can be crucial for data privacy. APIs share information in small packets according to the requests made to them.

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)

Enterprise Service Bus, or ESB, provides a connection bus to connect applications. In this process, all the applications are connected to a common bus that facilitates data and functionality transfer. To establish a new connection, you can connect the app with the common bus, enabling seamless communication between the new and the existing applications.

Challenges in Application Integration

Some of the challenges associated with application integration are:

Maintaining Data Consistency

When integrating applications, you must ensure data quality is maintained throughout the process. Inconsistent data is quite commonly generated during such integrations. This inconsistency leads to incorrect decision-making, increasing the error rate in reporting the results. However, you can easily overcome this issue by using SaaS-based tools such as Airbyte.

Airbyte is a no-code data integration and replication platform that offers 350+ pre-built connector options. These connectors help you replicate data from multiple sources or applications, including databases, ERP solutions, and more, into a centralized location while maintaining data consistency.

Let’s explore the key features of Airbyte:

‍Connector Development Kit: Airbyte’s Connector Development Kit (CDK) enables you to create custom connectors in just a matter of minutes.

‍GenAI Workflows: Airbyte enables you to load unstructured data into prominent vector store destinations, including Milvus, Pinecone, Weaviate, and more. Additionally, it supports RAG-specific transformations, such as chunking and embeddings, to load, transform, and store data in a single operation.

‍Data Security: Airbyte supports some of the most trustworthy security certifications, such as GDPR, SOC 2, HIPAA, and ISO 27001, which ensures data protection.

‍Customization Options: Airbyte offers various options that let you build and customize your data pipelines according to your specific needs. These options include a UI, an API, Terraform, and PyAirbyte.

‍Flexible Deployment Options: With Airbyte, you get flexibility in terms of deployment, as it provides you with three deployment options, including self-hosted, cloud, and hybrid.

Security and Access Control

Security has always been a major concern when performing any integration task. Before integrating multiple applications, you must consider robust security features like encryption that can help protect sensitive data from being compromised.

Performance and Scalability

As your organization grows, the business's specific requirements expand, increasing the amount of data involved. Efficiently handling this data is a necessity, especially since the integrated systems must be able to scale according to the specific requirements. Managing application integration helps you reduce challenges, such as resource wastage and performance issues.

Maintenance

Maintaining and monitoring the integrated applications is an essential step, especially when multiple connections are established. This requires you to maintain operational uptime between the frontend and the backend systems.

Best Practices for Successful Application Integration

Here are some of the best practices that you can follow to enhance application integration:

• Define Clear Objective: Before getting started with the application integration process, defining clear objectives about what you wish to achieve can significantly enhance decision-making.‍
• Prioritize Tasks: Efficient application integration requires prioritizing tasks so that your team can work to find the best opportunities at any given time.‍
• Security Considerations: Data security is the most important aspect of successful application integration. To safeguard your data from unauthorized access, you must follow security measures, such as HTTP encryption and the Oauth 2.0 authorization protocol.‍
• Documentation: Documenting the application integration process helps you understand why you initiated the integration task and track how you approached each challenge.‍
• Testing: After establishing an integration, you must create tests to check if the integration works as you thought it would. This process helps eliminate any errors that you might encounter early on.

Tools and Platforms for Application Integration

Here are the top three application integration tools that you can use to streamline the application integration process:

Dell Boomi

Dell Boomi provides an Integration Platform as a Service solution that helps you connect data and applications across various systems. It allows you to discover, catalog, and synchronize data while expanding connectivity between multiple ecosystems. Boomi’s easy-to-use user interface offers multiple connectors that enable you to perform seamless application integration.

SnapLogic

SnapLogic is an IPaaS service provider that facilitates application, data, and cloud integrations. It replaces conventional infrastructure with a more connected environment containing datasets, automated workflows, and GenAI applications. SnapLogic provides a no-code environment with over 700 connector options named Snaps to create workflows between cross-functional teams.

Jitterbit

Jitterbit is an open-source application integration tool that facilitates the automation of the integration process between databases, applications, and systems. It offers a user-friendly interface and provides a range of pre-built connectors, making it easy for non-technical users to perform complex integration tasks.

Key Takeaways

You must have acquired a thorough understanding of application integration. Before choosing any application integration tool and connecting various applications, you must know about the challenges you can encounter. For effective integration, dodging limitations and following best practices can allow you to streamline application communication and enhance productivity.

FAQs

What Are the Four Types of Application Integration?

The four types of application integration are presentation, business, data, and communication level integration.

What Is an Example of an Integrated Application?

A common industrial example of an integrated application is connecting sales data from Shopify to an analytics platform like Snowflake. This integration enables data analysis and the production of insights that enhance business performance.

What Is the Difference between API and Application Integration?

API enables software applications to communicate with each other and exchange data. Application integration, on the other hand, is the process of integrating multiple systems to communicate with each other and achieve a common goal.

Why Is Application Integration Important?

Application integration allows you to synchronize data across various applications and facilitates building new solutions using existing applications.

What Is an Application Integration Framework?

An application integration framework is a software platform that provides a structured approach to connecting different applications and systems, whether internal or external.