Integration
We live in a world of connected applications. In the previous section we focused on integrating a data layer to uncover new business insights and develop new ideas. But that's not the only area where Microsoft Azure can improve IT operations. Integrating applications and business processes can dramatically change how your company operates. Manual repetitive activities can be automated and executed on schedule or triggered by events. We can distinguish four main areas of integration:
- Application-to-application (A2A): A2A integration focuses on the integration of many applications inside a single organization. It has been used for many years and through exchanging messages you can optimize distributed business processes; for example, production data coming from manufacturing systems can be automatically posted in ERP.
- Business-to-business (B2B): B2B integration automates business processes between trading partners, similarly to how A2A integration is...
