Integration is Integration
When I think about integration, the first thing that comes to mind is application to application integration (A2A). Gartner states that application integration aims to make independently designed application systems work together. Their definition applies to my interpretation of A2A integration, which is the connection of disparate applications both inside and outside the firewall, regardless of location (including the Cloud). This interpretation includes integration between a few or many applications and encompasses all integration aspects such as, communications and messaging, translation and transformation, routing, process automation, data access and even extends to application access. This can apply to scenarios such as transaction replication or process activation across applications, providing web access to legacy applications and publishing information to mobile devices. Most of the integrations between these disparate applications used to occur by means of proprietary APIs, messaging or a combination of both. This can still be the case, but a larger percentage of integration today is mediated by integration middleware or via web services. Read more…