'Application integration platforms enable independently designed applications, apps and services to work together. Key capabilities of application integration technologies include: • Communication functionality that reliably moves messages/data among endpoints. • Support for fundamental web and web services standards. • Functionality that dynamically binds consumer and provider endpoints. • Message validation, mapping, transformation and enrichment. • Orchestration. • Support for multiple interaction patterns, content-based routing and typed messages.
Gartner defines integration platform as a service (iPaaS) as a vendor-managed cloud service that enables end users to implement integrations between a variety of applications, services and data sources, both internal and external to their organization.
Gartner defines multienterprise collaboration networks (MCNs) as solutions that support a community of trading partners of any tier and type that need to coordinate and execute on business processes extending across multiple enterprises. Gartner considers cloud-based MCNs to be a key technology to coordinate, orchestrate and automate an organization’s extended supply chain within the overall business ecosystem they operate in. The key capabilities of MCN solutions include three layers: Network representation and management, Application functions, Embedded analytics and intelligence.