Understanding Middleware Integration Technologies & How It Functions

Customer demands are ever-increasing and ever-evolving, be it a demand for instant text alerts, super fast shipping, slashed shipping rates, or 24/7 customer service. Keeping up with these dynamically changing demands certainly requires every business owner to coordinate the entire system efficiently, adopting technologies.
But what if their Customer Service Management software is not designed to integrate the Big Data platform along with the tools used in digital marketing? How would they correlate customer data with marketing strategies to provide customer satisfaction?
Well, this is where Middleware Integration Technologies comes into play.

How do middleware integration technologies bridge the gap?

Before explaining how it works and how it can benefit your business, let’s understand what is Middleware Integration Technologies.
Middleware is like a virtual glue that bridges gaps across diverse heterogeneous applications and databases, to offer unified services to the customers. In short, it connects various software platforms and devices together.

How does middleware technologies work?

As mentioned above, middleware literally acts as a middle-man software application, connecting operating systems and communication platforms, but it also serves the following purposes –
• Offers developers a unified interface so that they can work through application development and usability.
• Easily connects distributed and disjointed networks.
• Gives a sense of homogeneity to a heterogeneous array of software applications.
• Helps systems of various verticals to work together without creating duplicated efforts.
Apart from these, middleware can also assist software developers in creating advanced applications by offering them common programming abstractions, underlying hardware, and operating systems.

Why should companies use middleware?

The intent of using middleware is to trigger the connection between not only different software applications but diverse aspects of the same application as well. If you are considering investing in middleware to enhance Business development then you can look forward to achieving better outcomes with benefits like –
• Innovative solutions
• Easily accessible tools to work with
• Effective and strong connectivity across heterogeneous platforms
• Shorter transition periods

What are the types of middleware available?

At present, companies can employ two types of middleware applications namely –
• Platform middleware – It is accounted with connecting application architectures. In reality, some technological firms actually operate with multiple structures, and thus a strong need for a unified system is perceived. Middleware can help in supporting these structures by providing methods in domains of interconnections like test, production and development environments.

• Enterprise middleware – As the name suggests, this type of middleware has been designed to connect applications existing inside an enterprise. It forms the layer of software between the operating system and the applications thriving on the other side of the network, namely, business software applications.

It is indeed interesting to note that middleware is not a brand new concept, this term was coined during early 1968 and has been in use since the 1980s to link newer technological inventions to the legacy systems. As of now, Middleware can be utilized across content management systems, web servers, and other tools that are used to support application development.