'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.
The data integration tools market comprises stand-alone software products that allow organizations to combine data from multiple sources, including performing tasks related to data access, transformation, enrichment and delivery. Data integration tools enable use cases such as data engineering, operational data integration, delivering modern data architectures, and enabling less-technical data integration. Data integration tools are procured by data and analytics (D&A) leaders and their teams for use by data engineers or less-technical users, such as business analysts or data scientists. These products are consumed as SaaS or deployed on-premises, in public or private cloud, or in hybrid configurations.
Gartner defines integration platform as a service (iPaaS) as a vendor-managed cloud service that enables end users to implement integrations between applications, services and data sources, both internal and external to their organization. iPaaS enables end users of the platform to integrate a variety of internal and external applications, services and data sources for at least one of the three main patterns of integration technology use: data consistency, multistep process and composite services. These integration use cases are most commonly implemented via intuitive low-code or no-code developer environments, though some vendors provide more complex developer tooling.