System integration made easy.

Application systems integration is the process of linking together different computing systems and software applications physically or functionally. Separate systems such as e-commerce carts, accounting applications or customer relationship management (CRM) systems typically do not natively communicate with each other to exchange data. This lack of native connectivity creates inefficiencies requiring manual intervention to duplicate data between systems.

Application systems integration is, in the words of Gartner Group, the "unrestricted sharing of data and business processes among any connected application or data sources." While the separate systems may use different hardware, software and operating systems, the integration architecture is responsible for creating a unified messaging platform or "middleware".

Besides simply exchanging data, application integration goals should also include:

• Examination of data traffic in real-time, applying complex business rules and data transformation logic on the data stream;
• System intelligence for business process transformation that may be applied in a non-linear or in non-sequential time periods (an example might be reviewing past source transactions for a given past period of time, and automatically applying changes to destination data based on applicable business rules);
• The ability to quickly and easily modify existing transformational processes or create new ones as business goals change;
• The ability to adapt to changes in hardware, software, and source/destination matching requirements.

To help meet these requirements, the application integration environment should:

• Expose a common interface through which applications can communicate, using common integration languages;
• Allow service requests at the functional or data level for applications that do not support business semantics or standard integration techniques;
• Use a common set of process and service rules to ensure consistency and reuse of integration services;
• Use a scheduling service layer that allows repeatable processes at non-sequential time intervals;
• Use a logical service layer to apply business process logic by class and client preferences.

XML is a common language or enterprise application data exchange. XML is a meta-language standard for specifying a document-markup syntax based on plain-text tags. It's a subset of the Standard Generalized Markup Language. HTML, another subset of SGML, is a similar tag-based cousin of XML, but where HTML tags tell the browser how to display various elements on a Web page, XML tags specify what those elements are.

Aptalent understands application system integration. We've built the AptBridge^tm using industry best practices to help you meet your integration goals. For additional details on application systems integration, and how AptBridge^tm can help you with your integration needs, please visit us at: http://www.aptbridge.com