Overcoming Application Integration Challenges Using Middleware: An Overview

Abstract: No modern business operates in a vacuum. Commercial processes are constantly evolving, as is Software applications that companies rely on for critical tasks such as enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), supply chain management and financial analysis and reports. Therefore, the application integration has become increasingly important for anyone who wants to connect an older company applications to newer cloud applications, guarantee access to shared data for mobile and local devices users and navigate the digital transformation with the least possible interruption (and hopefully, great improvement over) productivity and profitability. An informed approach to integrate business applications is essential to create integration solution that leverages big data and runs all your individual applications together gently. Often, the easiest way to integrate applications is to manually program point-to-point interactions between two applications. But over time, as new integrations are added, it becomes unsustainable. Monitoring dozens or hundreds of manual integrations is very difficult. Therefore, the current best practice for integrating applications is the use of middleware to consolidate and federate the integration architecture.

Keywords: Application Integration, Middleware, Application Integration Challenges, Enterprise Application Integration