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What is Integration? | MuleSoft

What is integration?

At the simplest level, integration is the process of combining two or more things to create a whole. For businesses, the term integration often refers to software or system integration, which means bringing together multiple business systems to operate as a collaborative unit. 

Integration allows information to be shared between the connected systems. These integration solutions can come in many forms, whether it be requesting information from a website, internal employee systems sending and receiving information, or connecting customer data from a point of sale system to CRM to automate recommendations. 

Regardless of industry, software integration can be applied to several use cases for nearly every aspect or department of the business, so long as there are multiple systems, applications, devices, or datasets that need to be connected. 

Types of integration patterns

There are a few integration patterns that allow systems to communicate. An integration pattern is the method of communication the systems use to send data and/or receive data. 

  1. Migration: Data migration is moving a data set from one system to another. Think of this as a data transfer for a certain point in time, meaning that this exact data set will only be moved once. This occurs commonly when businesses switch from one system to another and the data in the old system needs to moved over. 
How does integration benefit the enterprise?

In this digital era, it’s important that businesses be properly connected; both from an internal and external standpoint. 

From the internal enterprise system integration perspective, business leaders need access to data from across the organization to make informed business decisions. Employees have access to the latest data on-demand and because employees aren’t wasting time aggregating and updating systems manually, they are more productive and perform their tasks more efficiently. 

It’s also important that customers can access and request the information they need when they need it. If they do not have a fast, positive experience with a website or integrated service offered by a business, it is unlikely they will be returning customers. 

Integration best practices 

Many businesses choose to integrate their systems in a point-to-point fashion, however, this method causes more harm than good. Point-to-point integration is when each system is connected individually to other systems. This works when there are only a few systems; however, once there are more than three integrated systems, dozens of individual integrations are needed. 

With this many single connections, it becomes messy and complicated for IT teams to add, remove, or maintain the web of integrated systems. This slows down the pace of innovation within an enterprise and wastes the IT team's time. 

The solution is to integrate these systems by attaching APIs to each application. This allows the applications to send and receive the right set of information needed to take action. These APIs can then talk to one another, thus creating a network of information. This application network allows businesses to unlock data from each of their applications, data, devices, and assets.

Through an application network, these APIs can be reused; speeding up the process of connecting systems and preventing IT teams from creating the same custom connections over and over again. Because an application network is a collection of APIs, they can be grouped by process or experience, so a set of APIs can easily be reused. 

To learn more about integration and application networks, download our Value of Integration whitepaper.

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