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Enable Business Transformation with Integration

5 May 20202 min read
azureintegrationdynamics-365cloud

According to Gartner, "organisations need to move from task-specific tools toward a hybrid integration platform. By 2022, 65% of large enterprises will have implemented a hybrid integration platform."

Update (2025): This prediction has largely come true — hybrid integration platforms are now the norm across most large enterprises, and the trend has only accelerated with the growth of cloud-native and SaaS-first architectures.

The essence of digital transformation, when viewed through the lens of integration, can be categorised into the following areas:

  1. Connect and engage with your customers and prospects
  2. Empower employees through mobile apps, self-service portals, and similar tools
  3. Transform products and become a service-oriented business
  4. Optimise operations, consolidate financials, and integrate with third-party systems

If you are in the IT department of a large organisation, the cloud can become an additional challenge in terms of integration. For example, how do you connect your on-premises database with a service in the cloud? How do you apply custom-built transformation logic to pass messages to SaaS applications? You need agility, flexibility, speed, productivity, and simplicity of rollout. Change is always hard, and business transformation is all about change. As more technologies emerge and more services are offered or built, the number of integrations required will only continue to grow.

Common Integration Scenarios

  1. Application to application (intelligent automation, file-based, protocol-based, etc.)
  2. Business to business (EDI, X12, EDIFACT, AS2, RosettaNet)
  3. SaaS
  4. IoT
  5. BI and MDM

Common Integration Challenges

  1. Interfaces and APIs
  2. Data sources and formats
  3. Service-oriented and distributed architectures
  4. On-premises or cloud deployment

These integrations form the platform for business transformation, and the integration layer itself becomes a business-critical component alongside the applications it connects. Azure is built to handle business-critical applications, but you also require highly resilient integrations to match.

Value is realised when applications are integrated with one another — and it is lost when they are not. Critical business processes can be blocked. To eliminate that bottleneck, Microsoft offers a full Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS). The Azure iPaaS consists of API Management, Logic Apps, Service Bus, and Event Grid, which together provide the following key benefits:

  1. API economy — not just building and using integration APIs within your organisation, but monetising them by exposing APIs to third parties
  2. Flexibility and scalability in your integration platform
  3. SaaS and mobile connectivity for modern application landscapes
  4. Enabling digital transformation through connected, automated processes

Here is a great video from Microsoft with more detail on how you can use Azure as an integration platform: