Even if the term “application integration” is totally new to you, you’ve probably experienced the misery of an unintegrated work environment. You know, the kind where you have to switch between five different apps just to complete one task, then manually update your team on a project management tool with about two hundred more features than it needs.
Integration can’t solve every tech stack hurdle, but it can make your apps talk to each other across teams and systems, creating opportunities for automation and cutting way down on tab-switching.
If your business (like most businesses) uses dozens of cloud apps every day, the best way to connect them is through enterprise application integration (EAI). Here’s what you need to know about EAI, its use cases, and how Zapier can bri…
Even if the term “application integration” is totally new to you, you’ve probably experienced the misery of an unintegrated work environment. You know, the kind where you have to switch between five different apps just to complete one task, then manually update your team on a project management tool with about two hundred more features than it needs.
Integration can’t solve every tech stack hurdle, but it can make your apps talk to each other across teams and systems, creating opportunities for automation and cutting way down on tab-switching.
If your business (like most businesses) uses dozens of cloud apps every day, the best way to connect them is through enterprise application integration (EAI). Here’s what you need to know about EAI, its use cases, and how Zapier can bring it to your business.
Table of contents:
What is enterprise application integration?
Why is enterprise application integration important?
Types of enterprise application integration
Enterprise application integration use cases
What to look for in an EAI platform
Connect and orchestrate your enterprise with Zapier
Enterprise application integration connects various business apps so you can keep data consistent and share information across teams automatically.
Consider a typical tech stack: CRM systems, HR platforms, marketing tools, enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, AI tools, data management apps, inventory tracking systems, project management software, comms systems, the list goes on. These are all* different* tools with different objectives used by different teams.
Now, your employees could operate independently—acting as couriers between apps, manually entering data and passing along info via email or Slack. But this inevitably leaves room for errors and bottlenecks across your business. EAI solves this issue.
EAI platforms typically use a middleware layer to broker data and flows between the tools your teams use every day. Here are just a few examples of quick integrations in action:
New project request on Slack? Automatically added to your monday.com projects sheet.
Generate a lead from a Mailchimp campaign? Record added to HubSpot.
Customer service ticket closed out in Zendesk? Itemized deliverables added to their next QuickBooks invoice.
And those are just the simple versions. At its best, with a tool like Zapier, enterprise application integration is full orchestration, automating complex systems across teams and departments.
Why is enterprise application integration important?
Imagine you have a file containing customer intelligence data that tells you what someone will buy next, when they’ll buy it, and how much they’re willing to pay for it. All you need to do is review that data, make a few calls, and you’ll have an inked deal.
Now imagine the file is stored in a lockbox that only one sales manager has the key for. You can have the best insights in the world, but if your data is trapped, so is your business.
Even if you don’t have a magic customer data spreadsheet, EAI unlocks a lot of boxes to help your business reach its full operational potential:
Helps you complete more tasks in less time: How much time does your team lose on basic data entry and migration tasks? Rather than inputting a new customer record in multiple systems or sending an email update on a project’s progress by hand, EAI does it instantly and automatically with preprogrammed triggers.
**Unifies teams with connected data: **How does Accounting know what (or how much) to invoice without proper order data from Sales? And how can they run payroll without employee compensation details from HR? EAI connects data systems to make collaboration between departments seamless.
Lets you work with better data: Like the telephone game, if you share info by email, web form, and chat, something’s bound to get lost in translation. Plus, there’s human error, which is super prevalent when it comes to data handling. But automating data transfer between systems keeps information consistent and accurate everywhere it lives.
**Gives customers a better experience: **I hate when customer service asks me for information I know they already have (but don’t know where to find it, or don’t care to look). EAI ensures every customer-facing team and AI agent has a complete, 360-degree view of the customer to deliver top-notch support.
**Saves money: **Order processing errors, poor service, delivery delays, and sales mishaps eat into your margins. And the more manual activity plaguing your operations, the slower things get done. Integrating software saves you time, and saving time saves you money.
You don’t need a DevOps team to make EAI happen
EAI is what an enterprise AI platform like Zapier excels at. It connects all the tools in your software stack, lets non-technical users create complex workflows, and comes with a suite of AI-powered tools to help you orchestrate your business.
Zapier Workflows connect your favorite apps (over 8,000 of them) in just a few clicks. Within minutes, you can start integrating tools and building automated workflows across the enterprise.
Zapier Agents take integrations further by letting you create your own AI assistants for automated analysis and decision-making while still keeping humans in the loop.
Zapier Tables gives you a central place to store and act on your data.
Types of enterprise application integration
The end goal of EAI is always the same: apps working together as one. But there are a few unique ways (or architectural models, in SaaS-speak) to get there:
**Point-to-point integration: **This is the old-school method of building a direct connection between apps using APIs. While somewhat easy, be wary of unmanageable, spaghetti-like tangles where the more apps you add, the more custom connectors you need.
**Hub-and-spoke integration: **More manageable than point-to-point architecture, the hub-and-spoke approach uses a central hub or middleware to connect apps and control integration flows. It’s a lot cleaner than a tangle, but one point of failure can make all your integrations go down.
**Enterprise service bus (ESB) integration: **Essentially hub-and-spoke 2.0, ESB offers dedicated middleware capabilities so you can route messages and data and control integration settings across your entire tech stack.
Microservices integration: This method breaks down apps into small, independent services. Each has its own APIs (or expediters), so you get more flexibility and ensure one integration mistake doesn’t torpedo the entire ecosystem.
**Middleware integration: **This approach manages and facilitates communications between software via a broker app. Middleware integration is often no-code, so it’s super easy to operate and doesn’t require direct point-to-point links. Zapier is the top middleware solution if you want enterprise integration without having to code.
Enterprise application integration use cases
Now that we’ve sifted through enough technical jargon to fill a cryptocurrency white paper, let’s look at how EAI applies to real-world business functions.
Sales and marketing
Many businesses are moving to a revenue operations (RevOps) model. Instead of separating sales and marketing functions, you combine them (plus customer service) into a single team dedicated to revenue.
This makes it that much more convenient to apply enterprise software integration. For example, you could use Zapier to connect a marketing automation platform (like HubSpot) to your CRM (like Salesforce), then sync the data with a revenue intelligence or orchestration platform (like Gong).
As an example, Vendavo used Zapier’s sales automation features to cut lead response time by 90%. Whenever a potential customer fills out their “contact us” form on Google Ads, a Zapier workflow automatically routes their data to the CRM and triggers real-time alerts for sales reps to follow up—no manual handoffs between apps or teams.
Here are some sales and marketing EAI templates to give you more ideas.
Unified lead capture
Easily channel leads from multiple sources into your CRM.
Intelligent multi-channel inbound message routing
Route new emails, form submissions, and social messages from multiple channels to the right teams with intelligent categorization and routing.
Customer service
Integrate your customer support platform (like Zendesk) with your live chat tool (like Intercom) and your CRM (like Pipedrive). When support tickets come in, push them automatically to a help desk or customer service agent without needing to click around between apps.
If you want to get more high-tech, you can also use Zapier’s AI chatbots to provide immediate service whether staff are online or not. Information gets routed and analyzed for a nearly instant response since you’re taking human delays out of the picture. Plus, it can automatically trigger workflows (like creating a ticket or scheduling a demo) based on your customer’s responses.
A real-world example: Zapier’s customer service integrations helped the Portland Trail Blazers save over 47 hours weekly on triaging thousands of customer surveys, collecting responses, and using AI to analyze them based on sentiment and severity. Responses are then pushed to relevant Slack channels, so team members don’t have to hunt them down.
If you want more ideas for how to integrate your customer service apps, here are a few templates.
Increase sales leads from support tickets
Identify whether support tickets contain buying signals so you can easily route new leads to sales.
Smart incident postmortem reviews
Turn every incident into faster learning, and save your DevOps team time, with AI-powered postmortem analysis and trend tracking
Human resources
Employee onboarding isn’t just an HR issue. IT needs information to prepare computer equipment and software tools. And managers need to know when new personnel are ready to roll.
So, if you add a new hire to your HRIS (like BambooHR), you can use Zapier to trigger workflows that auto-generate their Google Workspace email account, add them to the correct Slack channels, and provision their access keys via your IT management system. Once done, another trigger can auto-send their manager an email saying they’re ready for task assignments.
Netflix leveraged Zapier’s HR integrations to scale intern hiring without an application tracking system (ATS). By adding Zapier AI to the mix, they’re able to do things like send candidates custom follow-ups based on their interests, draft personalized outreach from interview transcripts, and automate handoffs from recruiting to other teams.
You can integrate your entire HR tech stack on Zapier—here are just a few templates to get you started.
Candidate risk detector for hiring teams
Automatically detect suspicious applicants using IP and phone verification to protect your recruiting process.
AI-powered hiring material
Make kicking off hiring a breeze with AI-generated job descriptions, application questions, and interview guides.
IT
IT automation is another great benefit of EAI. If an employee was recently offboarded, EAI can automatically revoke their access to apps, databases, and shared workspaces from Azure Active Directory. If a computer maintenance request comes in, it can automatically create a new ticket in your IT system and send a Slack notification to the IT manager.
With Zapier, you can do all this (and a lot more). Remote, for example, was able to dramatically reduce IT workloads using an AI help desk powered by Zapier’s app integrations, Tables, and Agents. With multi-channel intake, AI triage, and a host of other features, it saves them 616 hours monthly on IT support.
Here’s a template that replicates Remote’s system.
IT help desk
Improve your IT support with AI-powered responses, automatic ticket prioritization, and knowledge base updates.
Data analytics and business intelligence
EAI unifies data so you can make smart decisions and avoid just going with your gut on decisions that could cost your company thousands. By automatically aggregating data from your sales, marketing, and finance systems into a total analytics platform (think Tableau or Power BI), you get a full view of your business’s performance.
Zapier makes this simple by letting you integrate your tech stack and move data into any source of truth. You could build a centralized database in Tables, automatically pull data into it from all the apps you use, then port that data seamlessly back into a predictive analytics platform for the most accurate, holistic forecasts.
Ashby, for example, used Zapier to integrate their LinkedIn conversion data with their marketing automation platform. When conversion events (like a closed deal) come through, they’re uploaded automatically to HubSpot, making it easy to analyze, compare, and optimize ad campaigns.
Here’s a template to show you more ways this could work.
Automate offline conversion tracking across platforms
Stop losing revenue to missed conversions and get complete attribution across Facebook, Google Ads, TikTok, and LinkedIn automatically.
What to look for in an EAI platform
EAI platforms are great, but finding the right one for your business might lead you down a very deep Google + Reddit rabbit hole. Keep an eye out for these capabilities as you shop around:
Scalability: It’s basically a law of SaaS that as your business grows, so does its tech stack. Choose a platform with pre-built connectors and the ability to handle increasingly high integration complexity and variety. Zapier, for instance, offers enterprise-grade integrations with 8,000 apps and counting.
**Ease of use: **Your EAI tool will be useless if nobody in your enterprise can learn to operate it. Look for platforms with no- or low-code capabilities and an intuitive interface that’s friendly to non-technical users. Zapier lets anyone, including non-technical employees, connect apps, build automations, and program AI agents without draining IT resources.
**Security and governance: **Integrations can pose security risks, so your EAI platform should have role-based access control, multi-factor authentication, network protection, and compliance certifications (like SOC 2). Zapier has all these, plus clear audit trails for tracking events and pinpointing potential issues.
**Time-to-value: **“Enterprise” is an expensive-sounding word, but an EAI solution doesn’t have to break the bank or take years to bring in ROI. Zapier’s no-code approach lets you build, test, launch, and orchestrate critical automations in a matter of minutes, not months.
**AI features and connectivity: **Feeling the pressure to adopt AI tools? So is everybody else, but enterprises need EAI solutions that integrate AI apps into existing workflows without creating new data silos. Zapier is the leader in AI orchestration, letting you embed AI steps, AI agents, and chatbots directly into your workflows while connecting all the AI tools your teams already use.
Pre-built connectors and templates: Don’t reinvent the wheel if you don’t have to. A library of pre-built connectors and automation templates can dramatically accelerate time to value for EAI projects. Zapier lets you integrate and automate on day one with AI-powered workflow templates you can deploy without tapping your dev team.
How to implement enterprise application integration with Zapier
Unified apps make for a unified enterprise, and a unified enterprise is the dream of executive leadership teams the world over. But the idea of going all in on enterprise integration might shore up fears of overrunning costs and multi-year time commitments. The good news? Getting started with enterprise application integration doesn’t have to be a monumental, wallet-draining task.
Zapier lets you connect apps and spin up automations in minutes, not months. Start small (like forms synced to your CRM to support sales and service teams), then slowly add more flows until you’ve built a truly integrated, intelligent enterprise.
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