How Do You Know It’s Time for Software Integration Services?

This is where software integration services come into play. These can be highly specialized, such as Power BI integration services, which are skilled in working with Microsoft's Power BI, or more general ones, helping with a wide range of applications. 

 In this article, we shall speak about software integration services, what they look like, and why you need them.

Let’s get started! 

What are software integration services? 

Software integration services help connect disparate software systems and databases into a unified system. For example, if you need to implement some Microsoft products in your existing CRM, the integration team will do the job in a way that doesn’t interrupt your business. 

At the end, you get seamless data sharing, automated workflows, and improved efficiency in internal operations. 

How do software integration services work? 

If you are interested in what software integration consists of, the answer will be in four points: 

1. Connecting disparate systems: If you are using various systems for your customer management, deliveries management, inventory management, human resources management, the software integration services will united them under one hood, so that you can access the information about any of them from a unified dashboard and will be able to compare data, check them in one place and coordinate operations better (like sending coordinated messages through in-system chats, etc.) 
2. Enabling seamless data flow: the integration helps share data accurately and automatically across systems, allowing comparisons and the implementation of AI/ML solutions tailored to your business. By the way, the need to implement or develop custom AI software is one of the key reasons why companies hire software integration services. For AI to work effectively and productively, unified data flows with clear, structured data pipelines are essential, and software integration services help build them. 
3. Automating workflows: By allowing disparate systems to communicate with each other, business owners can build a surface layer of functionality on top of them, such as creating a unified report on stock levels and delivery schedules. 
4. Having a unified picture of what's going on: Key decision makers often have to log in to different systems or have their employees create generalized reports by hand. The integrated system can generate a general overview on its own and supports various kinds of reports, dashboards, historical data overviews, and AI automation.
5. Enhancing security and interoperability: the integration service brings your inner systems to the best security standards, so that you can avoid disaster scenarios and costly interruptions. 

Yet, as the tasks of software integration vary, the methods and technologies used to achieve them differ accordingly. 

Methods and technologies of software integration

Several technologies help unify different systems. They include: 

● APIs, or Application Programming Interfaces: APIs are a set of rules that establish communication between different software units. Often, online services already offer free-to-access APIs, making them ready for integration. For example, a popular streaming service, Twitch, offers a Twitch API for businesses that need to integrate Twitch streaming into their existing applications. The same refers to APIs enabling the integration with payment systems, chatbots and more. 

● Extract, Transform, Load or ETM method: this method allows moving data from one system, changing its format, and loading it into the destination system. This method is used to create unified dashboards or merged reports, as well as to enable real-time viewing across integrated systems. 

● Building middleware: Middleware is software that helps connect applications or services, facilitating communication and data transfer. . Integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS): There are already ready-made systems with tools for connecting different applications and data sources. These tools are usually cloud- and subscription-based. Although they can't always satisfy all integration needs, they cover many use cases involving the most common software units. 

Why would you need software integration services? 

If you have disparate systems used by different teams and want to scale, modernize, or implement innovative tools like AI, you are likely a client for software integration services. 

You might need help as your company grows, and it becomes harder to organize communication and coordination between departments. 

Another case is the need to modernize a part of your systems and add new features, thereby extending functionality and possibilities. 

Also, integration is necessary if you decide to train AI on your data and want it to continue working on the unified data pipelines, scraping information online in real time. 

Summing up

Software integration services are a range of techniques and methods that allow companies to bridge disparate systems, leveraging their feature sets to enable new features that support faster, more effective operations.