What is Application Integration?    

• Application integration is the process of building conduits between various applications to provide a seamless mechanism of sharing data
• Most companies have various applications that manage different parts of the company
• Application integration breaks down the boundaries between islands of information
• A single, holistic and interactive view of your business

EAI vs Point to Point

• Enterprise Application Integration is a scalable solution, usually more expensive.
• Uses middleware applications such as Biztalk, iWay, Oracle AI, Websphere, Weblogic etc.
• Orchestration, messaging, metadata
• Point to point is usually less expensive but very custom to the applications.  

Problems in companies

• Multiple software applications for tracking process
• Critical data residing in excel spreadsheets
• Partial view of business when looking at reports from different systems
• Missed up-selling, cross-selling opportunities
• Re-keying of data
• Working with inconsistent and out-of-date data

Benefits

• Reduce cost of redundant data entry
• Single, holistic view of company operations
• Always working on up-to-date data
• Prolong useful life of legacy systems
• Industry standard integration mechanism using webservices
• Enable interoperability with business partners using XML

How we do it

• Evaluate the entities stored in the various systems
• Identify the systems and people that need to use the data
• Choose the central storage mechanism
• Determine the best way to provide data to all systems:
• Real-time connection through web services
• Periodic batch import/export process
• Periodic synchronization

Examples of integration points

• ERP to CRM integration to consolidate customer information in different applications
• CRM and Accounting system integration to allow customer information flow to accounting system
• Accounting system to SCM system for integrated billing of orders in supply chain software

Our experience

• Great Plains accounting system integration with Indigene DNA analysis software
• AccPac accounting system integration with Indigene DNA analysis software
• Quickbooks accounting system integration with phpCollab project management software
• Timberline accounting system integration with Relius pension management software
• HIPAA X12 integration for Medicaid billing for various states across the country

Capabilities

• Our integration solutions enable communication based on web services and open standards such as J2EE, .NET, XML, SOAP, and EDI
• Utilization of Biztalk, iWay technologies for mapping, routing and message transformation for enterprise integration
• Support for ODBC, OLE DB, OLE DB.NET, WebSphere, etc