Integration

We analyze your existing business processes and use the flexibility of open source technologies to help your company streamline all the existing applications into one seamless system and integrate all master data with minimal risk.

The benefits:

• Operates seamlessly between legacy applications and new application
• Remove duplication of data records
• Single sign on
• Shorten learning cycle for the applications
• Replacing legacy applications with new ones without users relearning the new application

Why Do We Need Integration?

Today's business applications rarely live in isolation. Users expect instant access to all business functions an enterprise can offer, regardless of which system the functionality may reside in. This requires disparate applications to be connected into a larger, integrated solution. This integration is usually achieved through the use of some form of "middleware". Middleware provides the "plumbing" such as data transport, data transformation, and routing.

What Makes Integration so Hard?

Architecting integration solutions is a complex task. There are many conflicting drivers and even more possible 'right' solutions. Whether the architecture was in fact a good choice usually is not known until many months or even years later, when inevitable changes and additions put the original architecture to test. Unfortunately, there is no "cookbook" for enterprise integration solutions. Most integration vendors provide methodologies and best practices, but these instructions tend to be very much geared towards the vendor-provided tool set and often lack treatment of the bigger picture, including underlying guidelines, principles and best practices.

Alternative Approaches to Data Integration

Through mergers, acquisitions and the steady march of time, today’s enterprise supports an increasingly complex data environment with multiple varieties of data in multiple locations.

Valuable data assets sit trapped in information silos, blocked by incompatible systems and data schemas.
Such an environment creates roadblocks to performing essential tasks such as synchronization of data transactions, distribution of application data to multiple systems and migration of applications to new platforms.

One of the most common issues is managing Master Data.

Common Data Integration techniques such as the ones listed below are used to solve such issues.

1. Batch duplication of data process

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Using ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) tools such as Pentaho’s Data Integration to duplication data from one application/database to another.

• Advantage : Easy to deploy, Easy to maintain, Low cost, Not restricted by application
• Disadvantage: Data are not realtime, Duplicated data takes up 2xtimes storage

2. Data Federation

Data Federation streamlines the integration of data from many distributed sources without replicating or moving the data from the original sources. It provides applications with standardized access to integrated views of data through a single data layer that masks the complexity of the diverse underlying data sources.

• Advantage : Data are realtime, No duplicated data
• Disadvantage : Proprietary and legacy applications will be difficult to adopt

3. Enterprise Service Bus

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Enterprise Service Bus (A form of Enterprise Application Integration EAI) links applications within a single organization together in order to simplify and automate business processes to the greatest extent possible, while at the same time avoiding having to make sweeping changes to the existing applications or data structures.

In the words of the Gartner Group, EAI is the “unrestricted sharing of data and business processes among any connected application or data sources in the enterprise". Tools such as Mule is a messaging platform based on ideas from Enterprise Service Bus.

• Advantage : Data are realtime, Transactional support, Integrates both data and business process
• Disadvantage : Expensive to deploy