Modern business integration is a crucial accelerator for contemporary organizations that want to accelerate growth, unlock new revenue streams and improve customer experiences. It allows businesses to take advantage of existing technology, people, and processes to stay in front of their competitors.
Many companies use both on-premises solutions and legacy software. These disparate technologies, and the data they contain, do not communicate inherently. This is why businesses must develop a robust strategy for business integration.
Modern integration makes it easier for these business relationships to flourish in the digital world. This allows systems and applications within and outside of lines of business to seamlessly exchange vital information. B2B is a term that refers to the integration of business systems and applications. It can involve a wide range of protocols including AS2, SFTP HTTPs Web Services proprietary high speed file transfer methods.
Financial services, healthcare, logistics, and other industries are common use cases. These industries have a common need to securely link multiple trading partners, while maintaining robust security, audit trail, and governance capabilities.
Another common application is horizontal integration. This is where two or more companies from the same industry combine their efforts to offer a broader range of services or products. For example, women’s apparel companies might integrate with fashion brands that cater to teens and young adults in order to introduce them into new market segments.
Modern integration techniques enable these companies extract the right data and convert it to a form compatible with their partner’s central organisation device. The data can then go to the target app for processing. This can be used to automate a process and streamline it, improve business collaboration, reduce the chance of human error and delays and ensure rapid growth for a business.