What is an Integration?
An integration is software that communicates between your ERP and a third-party website or application. They can take the form of a “Sales Order Integration”, where the integration will be responsible for pulling ecommerce orders and creating them in your ERP system.
What is an Integration Platform?
Integration platforms allow less experienced developers an easier path to development and simplify the time for an experienced developer to release new integrations or update existing integrations. These platforms allow smaller companies who lack the expertise needed to fully develop an integration can review, run, and even modify their integrations in a simplified interface.
Cloud Integration Platform
Cloud Integration Platform are integration platforms that exist in the cloud. They are easier to set up since they do not need to exist on your local network, and they excel at allowing developers to push out integrations quickly.
As more applications are releasing cloud capable versions of their product, Cloud Integration Platforms grow in scope of what they can work with, however legacy applications that haven’t made that transition will often not be compatible. Since all the infrastructure is located on the cloud, these platforms come with the most expensive subscription fee.
Local Integration Platforms
Local Integration Platforms share the same development ease as their cloud counterparts but exist on the local network. This comes with a smaller subscription/licensing cost but a larger infrastructure cost. The infrastructure cost varies depending on how beefy you need your server, whether you own or rent cloud space for your network, and outages resulting in loss of functionality.
These types of platforms have been around for a longer period of time and thus have more functionality than the Cloud Platforms. The user interface tends to be more refined and easier to work with for newcomers while not compromising on speed for the experienced user.
Integrations as Applications
Integrations as regular applications offer the most flexible solutions but take the longest to develop and require the most experienced developers to create them. They are developed in IDEs with limited to no drag and drop UI offered by Integration Platforms.
These applications can live on the cloud through AWS lambdas or locally a program on your network depending on the functional needs. If one end of the integration does not support a web API, part (if not all) of the integration will need to live on the local network to access those APIs.