This very often follows on from Business Process analysis where the need for data to be shared between applications has been identified. Enabling applications to share or transfer data, whether as part of an overnight batch or a real time transaction, can have enormous benefits for your business processes.
Business Integrations will always endeavour to utilise existing applications and software licenses within the business, although this is not always possible.
If your application data can be transferred from the software running one business process to another, or be shared from a common data store, it can save immensely on double keying and the resulting user errors. This improves efficiency and control without necessarily the need to buy new software suites.