What is mobile app integration?

Today, mobile app integration provides you with innovative ways to work effectively and gives you the option of utilizing your complete infrastructure behind your applications. Thus, you can have a robust and convenient service framework and easy to use user interface.

Many organizations are now integrating mobile applications with their backend applications like CRM, POS, and ERP to get better results and improved productivity. Mobile app integration helps in giving employees and users a good experience.

In this post, I present to you the approaches and key challenges present in implementing mobile application integration.

Three approaches for mobile app integration:

• Point-to-point: In this approach, the business applications are connected to each other via one link. Such integrated mobile application systems are easy to build, but have a limited scalability.
• Multipoint: In this approach, databases and applications are connected with each other via a separate engine that receives and manages notifications from a number of channels.
• ESB solutions: In this approach, an enterprise service bus system is utilized that has a multilayer solution for IT companies. This enterprise service bus system uses several complex business apps. The system distributes data processing operations among other parts of the network.

Implementing mobile application integration is a challenging task. The following are some of the significant application integration challenges that organizations face:

• Lack of stakeholders: Lack of stakeholder buy-in is an important factor that prevents application integration from happening. The process of making existing applications work betteris not considered to be as necessary as developing and designing new applications.
• Legacy issues: The unplanned deployment of mobile apps by lines of business can create legacy integrations becoming difficult to incorporate into an overall mobility strategy.
• Cost: Mobile application integration requires early investments to gain long term monetary benefits.
• Testing: Each of the integration services performs differently on different platforms. In order to provide good performance, it is necessary that appropriate testing is conducted before its deployment.
• Complexity: Mobile application projects often face problems that are caused by integration complexities, and missing or incorrect access to back-end systems. Also, many of the mobile applications are coded in different languages. These languages are also used for developing various web based applications. Each platform provider modifies the preferred language in a way that the applications are easier to code and faster to build. This scenario restricts the capabilities of the language.

To overcome the above hurdles, there is a need of creating a prioritized application roadmap that defines the integration architecture and optimized protocols and platform services to meet mobile user experience. In next post, I shall discuss in detail how to address the above problems and provide easy and effective mobile application integration.