Sync Your Tech stack with Enterprise Application Integration

We’re going to start by throwing out a hot take.

Using big words doesn’t make the thing you’re describing important.

Don’t say “digital resource commoditization” when you mean “more people using the internet.”

There’s no need to say “achieve a certification” when you could say “get certified.”

Enterprise application integration, though…those are 3 big words that need to be that big.

It sounds like jargon, but it’s not. On the contrary: enterprise application integration (EAI) is indispensable for a fast-growing business.

Getting the right EAI solution can be the difference between having a growth strategy that works, and seeing your system come apart at the seams.

In this article, we’ll explain exactly what an EAI system is, how it works, and why the monday.com Work OS is your best chance at getting it right.

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What does enterprise application integration mean?

Enterprise application integration is a complex term with a simple meaning.

As a company grows, it adopts new technology to organize all its processes and staff.

Each software platform adds convenience and saves needless work in a particular area.

You move your company emails to Outlook because you like the UI. Then you adopt Slack for team chat. Dropbox lets you backup your files in the cloud. Stripe handles all customer payments. Et cetera.

Each one seems like a great idea at the time. They’re all good at what they do.

But the bigger you get, the more you realize that they don’t work together.

Say you have a campaign platform that sends out emails to your customers. When the customer clicks a button, they’re taken to a page that captures their email info.

So far, so good. But then someone on your marketing team has to take all those captured leads, and enter them into your CRM. Same with leads captured by your payment gateway.

Speaking of your payment gateway, your accountant has to transfer data from there to your tax software. And so on. If this gets big enough, your company could be losing hundreds of person-hours per month to menial tasks.

Enterprise application integration is the solution to this problem.

Enterprise integration establishes workflows between multiple applications. In a way, it’s a tailor-made OS, connecting the apps in your company’s stack in ways they weren’t necessarily designed to integrate.

How does this work? On a technical level, enterprise app integration happens in the middleware. The information from each app’s API is converted into a format the other apps can use.

The great thing about this is that it lets your apps integrate without requiring massive changes to the apps themselves. You can keep on using the apps you love, configured the way you like them.

The enterprise application integration market is growing.

More and more SaaS platforms are now being developed with an eye toward integration. But we still see too many companies struggling with inefficient, decentralized tech stacks.

That’s what spurred us to build the monday.com enterprise Work OS. It’s a centralized integration platform offering admin controls, analytics, and security features.

We’ll get more into how it works below.

For now, here’s the takeaway: a medium or large business can’t survive without a coordinated EAI approach. No integration means inefficiency, lost data, wasted work, and employees stuck doing menial tasks they weren’t hired for.

What is the importance of enterprise integration?

To back up our point, take a look at a few more use cases for enterprise application integration.

1. Customer relationship management

The job of a customer relationship manager is to funnel information into a single database from a wide range of sources.

That makes it a natural candidate to benefit from an enterprise integration system.

Think about how much time you and your employees spend entering information into Salesforce or a similar CRM. Then add the time you spend moving that data around to other apps.

Say you make a dashboard for your team to monitor your work with a certain lead. When information about the lead changes, you have to update both Salesforce and the dashboard.

Now let’s see how this works with the monday.com Salesforce integration.

monday.com Salesforce integration

Once your monday.com page becomes an integrated application with Salesforce, you can set data integration conditions for any piece of information to be transferred automatically.

All you have to do is change the lead in Salesforce, and your monday.com dashboard updates without you even having to open it.

2. Payment processing

Let’s add another layer into the process.

Suppose the monday.com page you just integrated with Salesforce is tracking all your customers above a certain lifetime value.

To calculate a customer’s value, you need to know how much they’ve paid you.

Let’s say your company handles payments with Stripe. You’ll need to use the monday.com Stripe Integration.

Your table already updates leads automatically, but you also want it to add a new row whenever a customer spends money on your site.

Once you integrate monday.com with both Salesforce and Stripe, you’ve officially achieved one type of enterprise application integration.

monday.com is now serving as a middle layer for 2 unrelated apps — and your workflow is stronger for it.

3. Project management

Let’s pivot from the sales side of things and get our hands dirty in the code.

The right enterprise app integration solution can make a huge difference for a technical project manager. For example, there’s the monday.com Gitlab Integration.

Gitlab doesn’t have a built-in option for creating Gantt charts or project timelines.

But monday.com is all about that. The solution? Sync them together.

In the screenshot above, you can see how changes in Gitlab can automatically affect projects tracked with monday.com.

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How do monday.com enterprise integrations work?

We’ve explained a handful of monday.com integrations above, but this article barely scratches the surface.

In that shot alone, you can see some of the different applications monday.com’s Work OS can knit together:

Communication: Gmail, Outlook, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and more
Marketing: Clearbit, Hubspot, MailChimp, Facebook Ads, and more
E-Commerce: Shopify, WooCommerce, and more
Development: Gitlab, Bitbucket, Jira, and more

And that’s still only the beginning.

The monday.com Work OS is designed to let you keep using the apps you already enjoy, with superior workflows, analytics, and security. It’s more affordable and intuitive than a customized middle layer.

It’s easy to fit into any existing system, and the results speak for themselves: a survey of just one enterprise-level client found 15,600 hours saved, ROI improved by 288%, and the number of meetings cut in half.