Integration architecture is where you unlock the real power of your application portfolio. Discover how SAP LeanIX can help you turn your IT landscape into a living ecosystem.
Integration architecture is an often-overlooked subset of enterprise architecture. Yet, your application portfolio will likely never achieve its full potential without integrations and application programming interfaces (APIs) to empower collaboration and cohesion.
Just as a Swiss army knife combines a diverse range of useful functions into a single tool, integrations can combine a range of functionality into one synergized IT platform. This enhances productivity, user experience, and even reduces cost.
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What Is Integration Architecture?
The integration architecture of your organization is the structure of the application programming interfaces (APIs) that enable your software applications to work together as a connected ecosystem, rather than disparate and isolated single-purpose tools. The role of an integration architect is to unify your diverse software application portfolio into a seamless, synergized organism that supports your operations.
Integration architects build APIs to act as pathways for information to flow freely between applications, even when they're supplied by different vendors. This way, you can choose a selection of software tools with the best functional fit for your organization and have them operate as if they were a monolithic tech stack.
In the past, organizations had to choose between sourcing all their software from a single vendor to ensure their tech stack was cohesive, or leveraging a range of tools that were the best-of-breed in each area, but that wouldn't work together. Integration architecture is about taking the best of both worlds to make a cohesive, but diverse tech stack.
This has a huge range of benefits, from giving you the flexibility to optimize your expenditure on tools that provide the greatest return on investment, to the scalability of adding new software capabilities that aren't offered by a single monolithic platform. Not to mention, when your vendor experiences an outage, or even goes out of business, you won't have to face your entire IT landscape shutting down.
For example, you may use Microsoft 365, but want to offer your customers the benefits of guided workflows within those applications. Your integration architect can implement WalkMe into your systems to offer that functionality, which Microsoft doesn't currently provide.
Perhaps most of your customers, partners, and agencies use Slack to communicate with you. An integration architect could work to implement an integration to allow you to read Slack communications in your Microsoft Teams instance.
The value of integration architecture is inherent in these examples. There are, however, further benefits that may not be so obvious.
The Value Of Integration Architecture
The key focus of any organization is always reducing cost. This is also the greatest benefit of integration architecture.
Monolithic architecture brings with it the risk of vendor lock-in and the need to make one toolset fit every need your organization has. With the capability of integrating any application into your IT landscape at any time, you're free to choose an application portfolio that offers the best return on investment.
You can also achieve scalability, adding functionality to your IT infrastructure by implementing new tools and then downsizing it when it's no longer beneficial. Despite this flexibility, your toolset will still empower your workers.
With key integrations between your applications, users will no longer need to copy information from platform to platform manually. This will immediately save them time, but also offer new value.
When a sales lead is converted into a customer, an integration could, for example, pull all the information from your sales platform into your customer relationship management (CRM) application. This will provide your customer success teams with knowledge of their customers from their very first interaction.
Likewise, your finance team could be empowered with live data about upcoming deals and customer churn from the CRM system. Conversely, they can build their staffing budget directly from HR data.
Integration architecture is about realizing the potential of your tech stack to become a smart, automated ecosystem, rather than either a set of disconnected tools or a static monolith. To do that, however, you need the right tools.
How SAP LeanIX Empowers Integration Architects
Integration architecture relies on a clear oversight of your application portfolio and the IT components that support it. Before you can begin to interconnect your applications in ways that enable productivity and reduce costs, you first need to see how your application portfolio functions.
SAP LeanIX gives you precisely the information you need to begin designing your integration architecture. By operating as a repository for your enterprise architecture data, SAP LeanIX is your source of truth about your application portfolio, but it's the analysis capabilities of the tool that really empower integration architecture.
SAP LeanIX fact sheets store comprehensive information about your applications, such as their performance, userbase, functional fit, and lifecycle. We even have specific tools to support you in analyzing their integration architecture.
SAP LeanIX Interface Circle Map
Our Circle Map offers integration architects a unique viewpoint on interface clusters throughout their application networks. These filtered overviews reveal provided and consumed interfaces and lifecycle phase-outs, to offer deep insight into the business capabilities integrations do or could support.
SAP LeanIX Data Flow Visualizer
The Data Flow Visualizer within SAP LeanIX incorporates modeling data for planned, active, and inactive interfaces to illustrate how data flows through your application landscape. This information can also be rendered as a color-coded graph to present to stakeholders.
To find out more about how LeanIX can support integration architecture, book a demo of our solution today:
