'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 data integration as the discipline comprising the architectural patterns, methodologies and tools that allow organizations to achieve consistent access and delivery of data across a wide spectrum of data sources and data types to meet the data consumption requirements of business applications and end users. Data integration tools enable organizations to access, integrate, transform, process and move data that spans various endpoints and across any infrastructure to support their data integration use cases. The market for data integration tools includes vendors that offer a stand-alone software product (or products) to enable the construction and implementation of data access and data delivery infrastructure for a variety of data integration use cases.
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.