To integrate systems that were never intended to work together in a scalable and manageable way, the formats (or the language of the specific application) must be understood by the other systems or another source must translate that format from the source application to the destination application. This is the function of the integration server. The integration server provides a loosely coupled interaction between applications. The message parsing, enrichment, transformation, and routing capabilities are encapsulated within the integration server. Note that the integration server does not keep any context for messages that are processed. Thus, it has high throughput capabilities. This is typically called a fire-and-forget model.
