Application Integration

Applications and Systems integration is about designing, building or adjusting your company IT or business process systems to ensure there's a cohesive approach to information across diverse components or equipment from multiple vendors.

Integration generally means combining parts so that they work together or form a whole. In information technology that can mean bringing different manufacturers' products together into a single system.

Why do you need it?
During the 80s, the dawning of the age of business computer systems, technology grew in great leaps and bounds with little concern for how it was all going to work together. Mainframes, minicomputers and eventually the PC had different operating systems, as did the networks that connected them.

As the 90s shifted the focus to connectivity, network operating systems became more complex but meant a greater range of hardware and software could co-operate on the same network. Now as we enter the age of interconnected enterprises internal systems are expected to interact across departments and branches as well as with the systems of partners in the supply chain.

That's where systems integration or the services offered by a systems integrator become invaluable. If in-house IT resources are already stretched, this is a function that can be outsourced to a consulting company with IT analysis and software customizing skills.