Companies integrate to make information available and reusable at any time, in real time. Integrating the right systems with the right solution offers companies the ability to make more informed business decisions quicker… much quicker. The companies that don’t care to integrate their systems, for cost, personnel, or political reasons, are businesses that aren’t thinking progressively. Their business plans are stuck in a different century, just as their company’s data is trapped in disparate applications and siloes.
Integration is the differentiating factor between success and failure when it comes to making critical information available, and making real-time business decisions. Full application integration is what allows modern companies the flexibility and adaptability to pivot strategically based on ever-changing data and customer behavior.
Art for Art’s Sake
The artist can draw, paint, sculpt, or create a piece of art that is divorced from some moral or serviceable function. The artist can make something for the simple enjoyment of it being art. As the 19th-century French philosophy suggests: ”l’art pour l’art” (art for art’s sake), but that’s why there are countless starving artists. That is where art differs from business: profitability is the goal for any company wanting to thrive and integration is the means to get there.
Without integration, the company starves.
Now let’s paint a business picture. 20th-century thinking is not going to allow your company to grow and take on 21st-century business challenges. From connecting different cloud systems to extending data to mobile devices, to business process management, the foundation of each of these processes is integration. Moreover, matched with complex event processing (CEP), integration can offer the ability to extract actionable intelligence from historical data and seize opportunities based on real-time flowing data.
Integrate for Business Sakes
On the surface companies want to improve operations and customer experience because that is what customers are concerned about. But that is only the tip of the iceberg. Masses of data and disparate systems are the problems not readily accessible without a proper solution; integration provides full visibility.
By integrating, business channels are connected, vital information of processes is available in real time, and there are considerable reductions in complexities and costs. Integration delivers business value that makes a company more flexible to address planned challenges, as well as become more adaptable to unplanned changes. Integration for the availability of information when it’s needed is the foundation of the event-enabled enterprise.
For more on how to integrate your systems to leverage Big Data, check out these Gartner reports:
Gartner: Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure for Systematic SOA Infrastructure Projects
