About Integrations

Integrations improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your business by sending data to applications and getting data from applications, seamlessly and without human intervention. Consider all the manual interventions that keep your business processes flowing as expected. An integration removes that manual work, thereby simplifying and streamlining your operations.

How Integrations Work

An integration moves data from one application to another. For the integration to pull data from one application and push the data to another application, the two applications' REST APIs must communicate with each other. An integration allows this communication to occur.

Moving Data, One Step at a Time

To understand an integration, think of an assembly line where an unfinished product moves from station to station in a specific order. Each station has special tools that build the product.

Of course, an integration is different from an assembly line. While an assembly line builds a product, an integration moves data between applications. However, both an assembly line and an integration follow a series of steps in a specific order. An integration follows these steps so that it can move data. You specify the steps and their order when you build the integration.

Related Components

In every integration, you specify how to communicate to applications using connections. Additionally, you specify how data is moved between applications by creating one or more mappings. When an integration needs to relate different terms used by different applications for the same item, such as a numeric country code used in one application and an alphabetic country code is used in another, you can use a lookup to relate the values.

See About Connections, About Mappings, and About Lookups.

Save Time with Recipes and Accelerators

Oracle offers several time-saving features for integrations, including recipes and accelerators. Recipes and accelerators are custom built for specific business needs and include everything you need to build an integration, including mappings and lookups. Before you start designing an integration, review the library of recipes and accelerators and see if they can help you jump start your integration work. See Recipes and Accelerators on the Oracle Help Center.