An overview of application integration concepts

• Authors: Irimia Roxana-Adina
• Venue: DNCOCO'08 Proceedings of the 7th conference on Data networks, communications, computers
• Year: 2008

In the context of the explosive growth of the IT dispersion, the importance of enterprise integration has developed significantly. Enterprise integration takes a strategic and coordinated view of an organization's integration needs. Enterprise integration is suited where an organization's business requirements dictate the need for the real-time processing of complex business processes across different IT applications and parts of the enterprise. Enterprise integration solutions typically involve some form of integration broker that coordinates the flow of information from one IT application to another. Importantly, however, organizations should not underestimate the many technical and management challenges that need to be overcome in order to achieve enterprise integration success. Information technology has known a continuous expansion in terms of the sphere of applicability and use of the informational products, but also in the development of new business opportunities created by the transition to the digital economy. The enterprise integration can be defined as the strategic consideration of the process, methods, tools and technologies associated with achieving interoperability between IT applications both within and external to the enterprise to enable collaborative business processes. Importantly, enterprise integration is not purely about technology integration. Enterprise integration also includes a consideration of business processes that cut across various IT applications, and so provides the overarching basis for technology integration, taking into consideration the managerial and technical challenges that must be overcomes in order to achieve a full applications and processes integration.