Enterprise Application Integration
– Anthony Marion, business development manager at LogicalTech SysTalk, says:
With the ever increasing dominance of IT in businesses, software applications have played a major role in allowing enterprises, whether big or small, to manage business services of critical nature with greater ease and automate handling of vital elements of a transaction such as customer relationship and business intelligence behind the curtains by multi-utility software. There is no denial to the fact that these software bring tremendous benefits by streamlining business processes, enabling healthy data collection and analysis and assisting improved internal and external communication with parties.
However, despite such efficient software, information that needs to be shared between several applications has to be stored in silos which necessitate manual sharing of data between different applications when the need arises. This is exactly where Enterprise Application Integration or EAI comes to rescue.
Having understood the basics, let us have a sneak peek into the immense benefits that EAI brings along for businesses:
Information Sharing
EAI allows seamless information flow between various disjoint software programs within a company. It also allows the exchange of information from systems outside the company to company’s systems. It can step up your data collection efforts and eliminate the need for each application to collect and store data for its own use which creates redundancies. A single point of data access can also be created through EAI for people who need to access data but do not have access to it through internal means. This effectively translates into the fact that with EAI in place, each employee spends lesser time in searching for the elements of data they require and the data they get is more refined and updated than what they could have got by other means. This gives rise to the much desired collaboration between people and departments.
Process Automation
EAI has all the potential to channelize processes that need data from several software applications. For instance, if data from CRM is integrated into e-mail marketing platform, it will be a child’s play to send messages to targeted customers by using the data on their demographics and preferences. When this effort is coupled with an analytics package to ascertain the success of a recent email campaign, you get magnified results. All such data can be fed into the company’s ERP system to ascertain the areas were investments would yield maximum results.
Reduced IT Complexity
Most enterprise level company owners would vouch for the fact that using new technology effectively is not everybody’s cup of tea. When it comes to technology, learning curve is often found steep due to high frequency of launch of new technology and in such a scenario a new application may not integrate well with existing systems. EAI overcomes these hurdles to allow smooth business processes by amalgamating information and functionality of multiple applications into one easy interface.
It shall not be an overstatement to say that Enterprise Application Integration is one of the best ways a user can bridge gaps between various software programs. Enterprise Application Integration facilitates flow of data from one program to the other and provides the necessary interfaces to manage the flow of data. Without an EAI in place, there are more than fair chances of a business becoming a loose cannon thereby preventing exploitation of existing software to the fullest.
“Anthony Marion is the business development manager at LogicalTech SysTalk based in Melbourne, Australia. SysTalk is the largest dedicated BizTalk consultancy and Specialise in Application integration, Data integration Enterprise Architecture solutions.”
