API Integration Platforms in Intelligent Information Management: Unlocking a World of Versatility and Robustness
By enhancing information visibility, enabling greater collaboration, and providing further opportunities for automation, solution integrations take your digital transformation even further by connecting the applications you use every day. However, integrations come in different forms, and with continuous evolution in the intelligent information management space, some forms are known to be far more versatile and robust than others.Â
Read on to find out what integration types will meet your needs, where the future of integration is heading, and how intelligent information management platforms are leveraging functionality to design and implement new integrations in record time.
Back-End Integration
Back-end integration allows databases within different solutions to communicate, passing information back and forth. Integrations of this kind help eliminate data entry by capturing information with web forms or OCR. Invoices, for example, contain plenty of information financial solutions need to code transactions in a general ledger. Documents can also be shared with this back-end approach, typically through hyperlinks.Â
This approach can help ensure other systems with documents, like customer relationship management or human resource management solutions, contain the latest versions present in your ECM solution.
However, back-end integration is effective for database and document sharing, and it’s primarily limited to on-premise solutions. As more organizations transition to the cloud, cloud-based integrations are quickly becoming an essential consideration for any integration strategy. In fact, Forbes estimates that multi-cloud organizations (companies with solutions from more than one cloud provider) will rise from 76% to 85% this year in 2024!
API Integration
Integrating at the application level has become a much more widespread approach with inherent benefits for solutions with native APIs. APIs, or application programming interfaces, act as digital untapped pipes for other applications to connect and exchange information.Â
By utilizing these interfaces, integrations can offer functionality outside of simple database exchanges, such as adding new customers or vendors in CRM or financial solutions and scaling the integration to different areas of your business. A back-end application designed to communicate with a Microsoft Dynamics database in its accounting solution, for example, would likely not be able to communicate with a Dynamics database for a human resources solution. An application-level integration, on the other hand, easily can.
What’s more, solutions using API integrations can even offer cloud-based integration, allowing your organization to take advantage of remote access, convenient maintenance, cost consistency, and security, which quality cloud solutions offer.
Integration Platform Functionality in Intelligent Information Management
Intelligent information management solutions that offer IPAAS functionality can effortlessly create application-level integrations with countless solutions. Integration Platforms as a Service (IPAAS) specializes in connecting the APIs of different solutions in practical and functional ways. Remember the untapped pipe metaphor we used earlier? IPAAS systems direct the flow of information to the pipes in each solution to fit the process at hand.
Without this functionality, integration would have to be outsourced or be time-consuming to develop. But with it, new, highly effective integrations with industry-leading solutions can be developed in record time, paving the way for a faster and more efficient digital transformation.
Summary
Application-level integrations offer a more robust feature set than their back-end counterparts and greater versatility, using functionality across databases and into the cloud. Intelligent information management solutions with IPAAS functionality can easily create application-level solutions, connecting your organization in functional and efficient ways.
About Square 9
Square 9 is a leading provider of AI-powered intelligent information management solutions that take the paper out of work and make it easier to get things done. With digital workflows that automate many aspects of how you work today, we make it easy by extracting information from scans or PDFs, storing documents in a searchable archive, and building digital twins of your current processes through graphical workflows.
