Most large companies today operate within a heterogeneous IT landscape, where several disparate systems fail to talk to each other. These enterprises invest in diverse technologies, and applications that satisfy an immediate business need.
As the IT landscape grows and becomes more complex, it can become increasingly difficult to share data across applications. This lack of information sharing can cause a lack of informed business decisions. For example, when financial applications are unable to integrate with an order management system it can result in stock outages, shipment delays or overstock situations.
Such challenges are driving enterprise IT customers to adopt services orchestration, services-oriented architecture (SOA) enablement, and enterprise application integration solutions to streamline processes and data. Enterprise Business Integration provides the technologies and services platform for the integration of various critical business applications to ensure the business operates efficiently.
What real enterprise IT mostly looks like
Real-world enterprise IT looks nothing like the neat, streamlined depictions in corporate presentations. Often actual depictions are a chaotic set of connections across multiple applications and business lines, which give rise to various challenges in sharing vital data or information across diverse applications, databases, geographies and external businesses. Integration services help streamline multiple application streams of enterprises so that they can work together and share information seamlessly.
According to the analysts at market watcher Gartner Inc., the worldwide application infrastructure and middleware (AIM) software market revenue totaled $23.8 billion in 2014, an 8.8 percent increase from 2013. While another leading analyst research firm Ovum estimates that the global integration middleware market will hit $17.9 billion by 2018. "The role of AIM as an enabler of service-oriented architecture is well established, and it is increasingly emerging as a foundational technology for mobile, big data and analytics, in-memory computing, and cloud computing initiatives, he added"It is also becoming a foundational element for businesses when adopting the Internet of Things, with the goal of universal integration in mind."
How are disparate applications integrated?
Integration across multiple business applications and systems not only creates inter-operability, but also helps develop consistent data, better integrate business processes across applications, and provides a reliable platform. Integration can be point-to-point between select applications or it can be a middleware-based integration when you have to integrate several internal or external applications. This kind of integration system acts as an intermediary for all kinds of applications. Integration solutions can work at both data and business process levels. Within this architecture, technologies will largely depend on the organization, its IT infrastructure, and its business priorities. The right technology partner can help architect the best-fit solution that yields not just short-term gains of cost savings, but long-term benefits of a streamlined business that is agile and scalable.
Build an intelligent and responsive enterprise
Enterprise application integration has come a long way from data-level integration to integration of heterogeneous platforms; SOA, business process management, analytics, in-memory computing and complex event processing are being seen as some of the most promising IT/IS strategies. Today, organizations are looking at technology partners to provide the infrastructure for upcoming integrations. Technology partners can help organizations better respond to constantly changing market conditions.
Dell Enterprise Business Integration Services has helped many enterprise customers successfully connect, converse and collaborate over their complex IT environments to be able to quickly react to tough market conditions, and maintain continuous business visibility.
For example, a large not-for-profit U.S. healthcare provider was looking to migrate multiple legacy integration engines (Neon, Datagate, Sybase Impact, XI) to a single, standardized integration platform. They wanted to eliminate point-to-point interfaces while decreasing their cost of maintenance and support. The Dell solution included a consolidation of multiple discrete interfaces to a common platform. A complex transformation and routing framework was developed with more than a few thousand interfaces developed, managed and supported in record time. The healthcare provider experienced an annual cost reduction of more than 7 percent, with a more than 92 percent reduction in high-severity incidents.
By choosing the right technology partner, organizations can gain great synergy—realizing the full potential of enterprise integration.
To learn more about what Enterprise Business Integration can offer your business visit Dell Application Services or contact a Dell representative.
Gartner Says Worldwide Application Infrastructure and Middleware Market Revenue Grew 8.8 Percent in 2014