Systems Integraion
If your business has grown in a piecemeal way with different departments responsible for their own IT development, and are considering ways to improve efficiency and get into business-to-business electronic commerce, then you need to think seriously about Systems Integration.
Systems Integration ensures that businesses can begin to operate more holistically, with systems working together to build a corporate memory and much deeper relationships with customers and business partners. Getting the old and new systems working together opens the way for greater co-operation, speedier access to data and a much better grasp of resources.
Benefits of Systems Integration
- Less concern with being locked in to a single vendor
- Seamless flow of information between systems
- Reduce duplication of processes and documents
- Greater co-operation between departments
- Ability to add greater value to each transaction
- More knowledge about the customer
- Greater chance of understanding business/market trends
Methods of integration
Vertical Integration is the process of integrating subsystems according to their functionality by creating functional entities also referred to as silos. The benefit of this method is that the integration is performed quickly and involves only the necessary vendors, therefore, this method is cheaper in the short term. On the other hand, cost-of-ownership can be substantially higher than seen in other methods, since in case of new or enhanced functionality, the only possible way to implement (scale the system) would be by implementing another silo. Reusing subsystems to create another functionality is not possible.
Star Integration or also known as Spaghetti Integration is a process of integration of the systems where each system is interconnected to each of the remaining subsystems. When observed from the perspective of the subsystem which is being integrated, the connections are reminiscent of a star, but when the overall diagram of the system is presented, the connections look like spaghetti, hence the name of this method. The cost varies due to the interfaces which subsystems are exporting. In a case where the subsystems are exporting heterogeneous or proprietary interfaces, the integration cost can substantially rise. Time and costs needed to integrate the systems increase exponentially when adding additional subsystems. From the feature perspective, this method often seems preferable, due to the extreme flexibility of the reuse of functionality.
Horizontal Integration or Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is an integration method in which a specialized subsystem is dedicated to communication between other subsystems. This allows cutting the number of connections (interfaces) to only one per subsystem which will connect directly to the ESB. The ESB is capable of translating the interface into another interface. This allows cutting the costs of integration and provides extreme flexibility. With systems integrated using this method, it is possible to completely replace one subsystem with another subsystem which provides similar functionality but exports different interfaces, all this completely transparent for the rest of the subsystems. The only action required is to implement the new interface between the ESB and the new subsystem.