Thinking from IntraLinks Integration Technology
One Size Does Not Fit All:
A Closer Look at Enterprise Application
Integration Technology
To fully enable true, enterprise-wide collaboration, businesses require
seamless connection of numerous and diverse systems, information and
processes. The critical systems that run an enterprise must also integrate
with those of their customers, suppliers and trading partners to enable quick
adaptation while maintaining and even improving the quality of existing
services. By using a flexible integration approach to link these systems,
organizations can help their employees be more productive, make the
enterprise more accessible to customers and enable secure and prompt
information sharing with suppliers and partners.
This white paper discusses the driving forces that have made enterprise
application integration so critical, reviews available integration approaches
and outlines areas of consideration when selecting the best methodology
for individual enterprise requirements. This paper will also review IntraLinks’
flexible integration solutions for uniting dissimilar enterprise systems.
1 866 INTRALINKS
New York + 1 212 342 7684
London
+ 44 (0) 20 7549 5200
Hong Kong + 852 3101 7022
www.intralinks.com
Thinking from IntraLinks
“As organizations increasingly
view information-related
capabilities as mission-critical
parts of the IT landscape,
they are moving toward an
‘information infrastructure’
that provides data consistency
and interoperability across
enterprise applications.”
— Eric Thoo et. al.
Hype Cycle for Data Management,
2008, Gartner, July 9, 2008
Why Integration Matters
Today organizations struggle to become more agile in a market place that is more competitive, faster
and has fewer geographical and time zone boundaries than a decade ago. Access to consistent,
timely and integrated business intelligence is vital for companies to understand and support this
rapidly changing environment.
To keep pace with the speed of business, enterprises must enable all applications to communicate
with each other — regardless of programming languages, system platforms, programming models,
protocols or data formats. This can be an arduous task as most modern businesses support
numerous applications, both purchased and built. A 2008 study indicates that companies support
anywhere from six to more than 100 applications depending on the size and type of business.
With the appropriate integration method, an enterprise can easily unite its disparate systems in order
to share large amounts of information inside and outside the organization, automate and manage endto-end business processes and workflow and foster cross-organizational collaboration and community
development. Three key drivers for supporting enterprise-wide integration are improved information
agility, IT responsiveness and cost and risk reduction.
Information Agility
Being able to more quickly adapt to industry changes and outmaneuver competitors has tremendous
strategic significance. Leveraging the business logic from multiple applications can be a fast
and highly efficient way to foster business agility and deliver new business capabilities. Through
application integration, heterogeneous data sources across the enterprise can be united for faster
access to critical information. An organization can in turn identify and respond more quickly to internal
and external events.
In addition, integrating critical systems that run a business with those of customers, suppliers and
trading partners improves service quality and maintains a competitive advantage.
IT Responsiveness
The ability to react to changing business objectives hinges upon an IT infrastructure that can
respond in kind. Too often an IT department can be perceived as a bottleneck, hampering desired
responsiveness by requiring too much time or too many resources to fulfill new or changing
business requirements. The integration of existing applications and business processes provides IT
organizations with new capabilities for meeting business requirements and adding strategic value.
Cost and Risk Reduction
In the current economic climate, IT and business decision makers are searching for ways to make
their enterprise more efficient without huge investments. The pursuit of this efficiency naturally leads
to tough questions about application consolidation and many decision makers are asking what to do
about packaged and legacy systems. Is it better to replace them and start from scratch? Or can we
get more value and efficiency from what is already in place?
With the right integration approach, reusing existing applications and enterprise systems can help
speed process deployment and create a nimble, efficient and successful business. Integration can
also eliminate the manual steps that users employ to move information between disconnected
systems and thereby ensure that all compliance and security standards are met by well-defined
processes that can run on regular intervals. Integrated services can be reused across the enterprise
— individually or in combination with one another — to hasten development at a lower cost and with
less risk to the organization.
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Integration Technology
Deciding on an Integration Approach
Most companies have an environment of disparate legacy systems, applications, processes, and
data sources, which typically interact by a maze of interconnections that are poorly documented and
expensive to maintain. Additional problems arise from market consolidation in the digital age, where
mergers and acquisitions of companies can increase the complexity of system integration exponentially.
The segmentation of information systems was exacerbated with the introduction of commercial offthe-shelf applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management
(CRM), supply chain management (SCM) and portals. Early on, these systems were designed as selfcontained “black-boxes” with little or no means for accessing internal data or processes. Although
many of these applications now provide better access to their underlying data and business logic,
integrating them with other systems in the enterprise is still a challenge.
Furthermore, and especially in today’s economic environment, businesses are turning to cloudbased SaaS solutions to reduce capital expenses, to speed time to value and to minimize the use of
essential internal resources on non-core activities. With this increasing use of cloud-based services,
there is also greater need for integration with both on-premise solutions and other SaaS services.
A critical challenge for organizations is deciding what type of integration approach to utilize. An
enterprise has several choices for integration including:
• Building a custom-code solution utilizing internal resources
• Building a custom-code solution with system integrators, based on a vendor’s Application
Programming Interfaces (APIs)
• Purchasing pre-packaged integrations from vendors
Building an In-House Custom Solution
When a specific function is needed between applications, custom code can be the most expedient
option to meet a tight deadline. It is typically designed and implemented solely for the purpose of
directly integrating two specific systems. The approach can be tailored to the exact business need of
the organization but does require significant investment in internal resources or contracted developers
to build and maintain the integration.
Building a Custom Solution with APIs
Organizations often rely on others to perform functions they may not be able or permitted to
do themselves, such as packaging and shipping finished products. To do this correctly, complex
instructions and request processes are needed. Similarly, virtually all software has to request other
software to perform tasks.
To accomplish this, the asking program uses a set of standardized requests or APIs, which have been
defined for the program being called upon. In essence, a program’s APIs define the proper method for
a developer to request services from that program. Developers can make requests by including calls
within the code of their applications. By providing a means for requesting program services, APIs are
said to grant access to or open an application.
Purchasing Out-of-the-Box Integrations
Traditionally, any application wanting to use other systems’ services would need to do so via the
provided APIs. However, with many off-the-shelf packages this was not possible, or with some legacy
applications it was extremely difficult. To help in these situations, integration firms began developing
a series of pre-packaged integrations to provide an interface for specific applications or groups of
applications in a non-invasive fashion.
By providing a simple, easy-to-use integration tool that would hide all the network complexities from
application programmers, these integration packages made it easier and faster to write external
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Benefits of
Integration
•Increased employee
productivity
•More efficient sharing of
information with suppliers
and partners
•Faster response to customer
requirements
•Making the enterprise more
accessible to customers
•More effective integration,
automation and management
of end-to-end processes
•Eliminate manual steps to
ensure that project timelines
are not missed due to user
errors or training needs
•Reduced maintenance time and costs
•Sharing data intelligently
between dissimilar
applications across an
enterprise
Thinking from IntraLinks
functions into application programs. Packaged connectors were also designed to integrate business systems with popular Enterprise Resource
Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) products to help speed time to market and reduce costs. And because these
packages were made available on multiple platforms, they also simplified cross-platform communications.
Deciding to Build Versus Buy
While the custom code approach appears easy, it can end up being a complex endeavor. As custom code is typically rigid and inflexible, companies
often suffer the pains of debugging and maintaining their integration code as their business environments became more dynamic and expand.
Although initially a custom solution may have been more cost effective, over the long term such an approach often requires ongoing maintenance
from programmers with specialized skills; resources many IT organizations lack.
API-based integration does give complete control over system behavior, but this involves highly specialized programming skills which are often quite
different on each platform. The APIs are often complex at best and plenty of exception handling and recovery logic is required in the code if there is
to be any degree of success. Such integrations can be exceedingly expensive to build and sometimes take so long to implement that the business
benefits often come far too late to justify the effort.
Pre-packaged integration solutions can help to rapidly streamline business processes, regardless of whether they cross functional boundaries within
an enterprise or extend to systems along its value chain. Using these connectors can help improve operational efficiency, increase responsiveness
to competitive pressures and save time and money. Unfortunately, pre-packaged solutions are not available for every application an organization may
rely on.
New Technology Considerations
While SaaS and Cloud-based computing initiatives bring real advantage to today’s organizations, they do add complexity to the integration effort.
Although major vendors have pledged to maintain open standards to enable data portability (to avoid vendor lock in), there is a risk that data will not
move easily between vendors. Some enterprises may opt to utilize pre-integrated suites from one vendor, which rely on a “core” to provide integration
for products from the vendor and its partners. This causes a distinct disadvantage by locking customers into a particular environment and limiting the
ability to utilize innovative new technologies.
The use of middleware, such as application integration platforms, as well as systems that leverage web services are approaches that have gained
popularity in recent years. With either approach there are challenges with security, data models, business processes and workflow.
Application Integration Platforms
The goal of an application integration platform is to create an environment in which an enterprise can:
• Ensure that information in multiple systems is kept consistent
• Ensure that integrated applications are using the same datasets and can share information
• Integrate all types of applications (independent from platform, programming language or resource) so they are bound together in workflows
and processes
• Account for security considerations so that, for example, data is shared only with the appropriate resources
Best-of-breed integration solutions offer more than just the transformation of data between two different formats. Workflow, which encompasses
the end-to-end series of steps needed to automate a business process, is mandatory to ensure the complete automation of complex business
processes. Secure and reliable communication, content-based routing, business logic rules handling, data transformation, cleansing and validation
are all examples of real-world requirements to address otherwise manual tasks.
Web Services
Web services are most often “web APIs” that can be accessed over a network such as the Internet and are executed on a remote system hosting
the requested services. Two of the most common web service methodologies being utilized are Extensible Markup Language (XML) messages that
abide by the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) standard and Representational State Transfer (REST) which is a style of software architecture for
distributed hypermedia systems such as the World Wide Web.
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Integration Technology
The SOAP standard is typically used for exchanging structured data. REST web services are recently capturing more recognition as they are often
better integrated with HTTP and web browsers than SOAP-based services. A RESTful architecture consists of client systems which initiate requests
to servers, and servers which then process the requests and return suitable responses. The scalability of component interactions, simplification of
interfaces, autonomous deployment of components, and the utilization of components for reducing latency, enforcing security and including legacy
systems are the primary goals of REST-style architecture.
REST web services are recently capturing more recognition as they are often better integrated with HTTP and web browsers than SOAP-based
services. RESTful architecture consists of client systems which initiate requests to servers, and servers which then process the requests and
return suitable responses. The scalability of component interactions, simplification of interfaces, autonomous deployment of components, and the
utilization of components for reducing latency, enforcing security and including legacy systems are the primary goals of REST-style architecture.
Integration Security
Enterprise integration raises concerns about security. The introduction of new technology within an organization presents new risks not present
in older legacy systems, which have a defined set of users accessing information in a controlled office space. In the context of distributed and
integrated systems, applications alone can no longer be in charge of security, and security models cannot be hard-coded into applications. This
complexity dictates additional requirements be met in order to have a secure, integrated environment.
• Privacy, confidentiality and compliance: A requirement that private or confidential information will not be disclosed to unauthorized individuals.
• Data, system and application integrity: Data integrity is a requirement that information and programs are changed only in a specified and
authorized manner. System integrity and application integrity are requirements that a system or application performs its intended functions in
an unimpaired manner, free from deliberate or inadvertent unauthorized manipulation.
• System availability: An assurance that a system works promptly and service is not denied to the authorized users.
• User authorization: A security concept where access to resources is allowed to only those who are permitted to use them. This is termed as
access control and is usually determined by finding out if a person is a member of a particular privileged group.
• User authentication: The process of establishing or confirming the identity of a user. This usually involves a username and password
combination, but can also include other methods of demonstrating identity such as a smart card or use of biometrics techniques such as
fingerprint reading or retina scanning.
Identity Management
It is not uncommon for employees to have dozens of IDs and passwords to remember in order to accomplish their daily tasks. This can lead to
a phenomenon called password fatigue which may encourage people to adopt habits that reduce the security of their protected information. For
example, users might use the same password for several different systems, deliberately choose easy to remember passwords that are vulnerable
to cracking, or rely on written records of their passwords. As a result, Single Sign-On (SSO) technologies have grown in popularity. With SSO, a user
logs in once and gains access to all systems without being prompted to log in again at each.
But today’s businesses rely upon SaaS applications such as CRM systems, supply chain management systems, payroll and expense reporting tools
and human resource management systems that live outside their firewall and that often have separate identity management requirements. Internal
SSO solutions were not designed to be used in a cloud-based computing environment with one organization managing user’s identities and another
managing the systems and applications.
IT attempts to extend internal SSO systems to external systems have led to the development of Internet SSO (ISSO), which is single sign-on
that works across the Internet. ISSO allows users with Web browsers to securely and easily access multiple Web applications while only logging
in once, even though the applications are most likely managed by different organizations. ISSO depends upon federated identity management
standards such as the XML - based Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML). A SAML implementation can support ISSO connections with
many different systems both inside and outside the corporate firewall.
One Size Does Not Fit All
Today’s decision makers are demanding that their enterprise run faster and more efficiently, while also avoiding huge investments. They look to IT
to provide strategic value through new applications with flexibility and in record time. In the world of application integration, though, there is no
“one size fits all” solution. In choosing an integration strategy, enterprises must be acutely aware of the repercussions of the path chosen, as a poor
choice could result in the continual depletion of valuable IT resources and exponential costs to the enterprise.
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Thinking from IntraLinks
IntraLinks Integration Strategy
IntraLinks understands that different organizations have different needs and as such offers a number of complementary integration technologies.
These varied integration offerings give IntraLinks customers the opportunity to choose the best fit for each of their integration requirements.
IntraLinks integration capabilities enable enterprises to:
• Easily create and deploy customized business applications
• Connect and directly integrate IntraLinks with existing enterprise solutions
• Manage workflow and information exchange between systems
With IntraLinks Integration, enterprises can reduce the effort and cost required to implement new capabilities and accelerate the rate at which
business benefits are realized.
• IntraLinks APIs offer a simple way to exchange requests and data between the IntraLinks platform and the enterprise business systems.
Developed using a RESTful architecture, IntraLinks APIs are web services ready and used extensively by IntraLinks development teams to
create applications. Developers will benefit from a broad set of functionality and a comprehensive API map to manage and control content,
users, sessions and system administration within their own custom applications.
• IntraLinks Adapters quickly and seamlessly connect virtually any set of information assets. These comprehensive adapters enable data
integration requirements to be addressed, while eliminating the need for hand coding and shielding developers from the underlying
complexities that often exist in both the out-of-the-box solutions and proprietary systems. The IntraLinks adapters use a client-side .NET
application that utilizes XML - based file messaging to enable communications between IntraLinks and external systems. The IntraLinks
portfolio of adapters includes pre-packaged functionality for contact management, file management and basic system configuration.
• IntraLinks Connectors are pre-built components that quickly connect and integrate IntraLinks with the APIs of other enterprise software
systems. Supporting both cross-industry and industry-specific connectivity, the connectors help maximize any investment made in leading
packaged applications by extending their access beyond the enterprise firewall to external customers and partners. IntraLinks connectors enable
quick and easy maximization of existing software investments. Packaged services include file transfer, permissioning, reporting and workflow.
APIs
Adapters
Connectors
Description
RESTful API set for custom integration
Configurable tool enabled integration via
standard input / output (XML)
Out-of-the-box integration capabilities for
specific enterprise software systems
Offerings
API and Documentation, Test
Environment
Upload, Download, Contact and
Exchange Management
IntraLinks Connector for SharePoint
Ideal Customer
Clients with development expertise to
build their own application
Clients with some technical expertise
to match XML formats for functional
integration
Clients with integration needs for
specific applications and with relatively
little technical expertise
Additionally, IntraLinks supports a SAML - based federated identity management system. The IntraLinks ISSO framework increases security by
reducing the number of user IDs/passwords needed for external systems, simplifies usability and streamlines user access to IntraLinks with
seamless access from an internal portal or Windows login. Some specific benefits include:
• Reducing password fatigue from different user ID & password combinations
• Reducing time spent re-entering passwords for the same identity
• Reducing IT costs due to lower number of IT help desk calls about passwords
• Security on all levels of entry/exit/access to systems without the inconvenience of re-prompting users
• Centralized reporting for compliance adherence
IntraLinks Integration solutions can help enterprises address their application and process integration challenges, while supporting the business
strategy and enabling a more competitive market position. These solutions enable quick and easy creation of integrated processes that exchange
information between applications such as ERP and CRM programs, while automating and managing end-to-end processes more effectively. The
result is a significant decrease in maintenance time and costs. IntraLinks Integration solutions support a full range of integration scenarios by
enabling both the external access of enterprise data, as well as the notification of events occurring within applications.
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Integration Technology
Conclusion
For most companies, today’s competitive and rapidly changing business environment mandates the ability to automate and manage business
processes and workflow, connect content management systems and enable cross-organizational collaboration with customers, suppliers and
partners. The success of this depends largely on the ability of the IT infrastructure to leverage existing applications and infuse business processes
with new capabilities.
The best methodology is to integrate diverse business systems and enable all applications to communicate with each other regardless of
programming languages, platforms, protocols or data formats. Although there are numerous approaches to integrate systems, there can be no
“one size fits all” answer. As such, companies must source a variable integration solution, such as IntraLinks Integration, that will meet their varied
requirements and seamlessly unite systems across the enterprise and externally.
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About IntraLinks
For more than a decade, IntraLinks’ enterprise-wide solutions have been facilitating the secure, compliant
and auditable exchange of critical information, collaboration and workflow management inside and outside
the enterprise. For simplifying business processes such as board of director communications, post-merger
integration, acquisition management, corporate finance and legal matter management, the IntraLinks
platform can help improve operational efficiency and reduce time and costs while adding increased security
and control to processes. More than 750,000 users across 90,000 organizations around the world rely on
IntraLinks, including 50 of the 50 top global banks, 10 of the top 10 life sciences companies, 25 of the top
25 law firms, and 14 of the 15 largest private equity firms.
To learn how IntraLinks can transform your business, visit www.intralinks.com or contact us at:
Tel: 866 INTRALINKS (USA)
Tel: + 44 (0) 20 7549 5200 (EMEA)
Tel: + 852 3101 7022 (APAC)
[email protected]
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1 866 INTRALINKS
New York + 1 212 342 7684
London
+ 44 (0) 20 7549 5200
Hong Kong + 852 3101 7022
www.intralinks.com
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