For long years, most firms treated software programs as commodities. These firms have traditionally viewed them as simple to adopt, replace, and have little influence on business continuity. And this is a huge error. Software applications are “living” actors that interact with one another to carry out business activities.

Nowadays, software applications are very essential actors in corporate processes, assisting human actors to execute their job in a much more effective way and even making decisions on their own.

When deciding which software applications to incorporate into a company’s business processes, many firms wind up with a collection of apps from several providers. This article does not address whether having numerous vendors is a good or bad move. There are numerous advantages and downsides to such a selection, which vary depending on each company’s corporate strategy. However, having numerous vendors forces the companies to devise an effective strategy for getting those apps “to talk to each other”. And this is what software application integration is about.

Software application integration entails creating a layer of intermediation between the various applications (known as “middleware”) that allows each application to notify the other applications when an event of interest to them occurs, and thus initiate a set of actions (typically known as a workflow) to transfer data to and from the interacting applications. For example, you can automate the creation of new client entries in your ERP application by having your CRM program notify it when a deal is closed.

Nowadays, there are several techniques to develop the middleware layer. There are well-known and robust middleware solutions such as Zapier, Apache AirFlow, and Celigo that help to automate this process by using a less-code approach.

You can also choose to build your own middleware platform from scratch (usually for complex integration scenarios with highly particular rules that only apply to your organization). In this approach, you use the APIs (application programming interfaces) supplied by the software programs to complete each step of the integration.

No matter which approach you take, if you are dealing with too much manual work required to enter the same information in multiple systems, or if you want to automatically trigger actions in other systems when an action is performed in one of them, saving time, lowering costs, and increasing agility, then creating a middleware layer to integrate your software applications is what you are looking for.