API as a tool for connecting different systems

API integration is the process of establishing a secure, reliable and efficient connection between the API of two programs. This allows them to communicate with each other and exchange data. Integration allows companies to use data from multiple applications to improve the functionality of their own business processes. The inclusion of advanced and more functional technologies in an existing business technology package allows you to expand the capabilities of internal workflow and customer experience.

This is done by exposing the API to the world, which other users outside the company can refer to and access. If someone wanted to provide an API for ordering a product or checking on their order, they could use integration technology to create that API and let people know in real time what is happening with their order.

An important difference between the third and fourth examples is that the third example calls or uses an API provided by someone else, while the fourth example provides an API to query other systems.

In general, API integration is important for logistics companies, manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers and others because it allows you to preserve existing applications and open them up to other systems and applications throughout your B2B ecosystem. This will accelerate business processes, enable faster application integration and improve visibility into your end-to-end business processes, ultimately resulting in increased profits, better relationships and higher productivity.

As you see, API integration provides many valuable benefits to your business as a whole, but diving a little deeper, what else can API integration help you with?

For decades, integration has been one of the most complex, specialized, and frustrating tasks in the IT world. API makes integration easier by simplifying the connection, movement and transformation of data. By enabling different systems or applications to collaborate and share information seamlessly, all your business processes become fast and autonomous.

Performing tasks manually is cumbersome and time-consuming. Automating routine tasks through API integration is a reliable way to make your life easier.

API integrations are very important for running your business and it doesn't matter if it's big or small, because when you build your own API interface, a small business can turn into a big one in a short time. Imagine that you are a small credit union that provides money loans and you have built an API interface for your CRM and your website/landing page. This allows you to cooperate with various lead generators that will provide you with a stream of leads/customers to process. Accordingly, through the API integration, you will automatically be able to send processing statuses and commission for them to the lead generator in response, without spending additional precious time on this, which is better spent on lead processing. And this is just one of the small examples of API integration capabilities.

Our company AlterEGO has been engaged in API integrations for over 10 years. We have performed integrations for both large businesses (pharmacy chains, credit institutions, online stores) and small businesses that needed small integrations (for example: transferring a tag between Pipedrive CRM and CloudTalk (call center), where standard integration and integration through Zapier (a service that connects different services without using development) did not provide such an opportunity to transfer this field.

API integration is an integral part of the digital era. Businesses that thrive are already enjoying the various benefits of integration. Therefore, you should also consider it if you want to outperform your competitors.