Untangle your IT ecosystem with an iPaaS
Summary
To keep up with the rapidly evolving digital world, companies digitalize and automate their business processes by integrating various software solutions and cloud applications. From e-commerce, ERP, CRM, PIM, WMS, and many other such systems, the number of these applications that businesses have to integrate with is constantly increasing. Traditionally, businesses chose to integrate these software solutions in a point-to-point fashion (using custom-code) and without investing in scalable IT infrastructure. In the long term, this usually results in IT ecosystems that are entangled with data silos, scattered software connections, integration errors, and black box issues (lack of visibility and transparency). Thus, the true challenge in building a future-proof integration strategy lies in ‘How’ businesses choose to create these application integrations to enable business automation.
The Alumio iPaaS (integration Platform as a Service) is a next-gen, cloud-native platform that helps integrate unlimited systems, SaaS (Software as a Service), apps, and data source, via a user-friendly interface. It provides scalable infrastructure, workflow automation capabilities, and data transformation features required to seamlessly integrate and organize all the software solutions of a business on one platform, in a way that’s flexible, scalable, future-proof, and most importantly - untangled.
The need to build application integration ecosystems
91% of businesses are engaged in some form of digital initiative, and 87% of senior business leaders say digitalization is a priority"
It all starts with the need for digital transformation…
Digital transformation involves implementing digital technology and applications to automate various business processes of a company, from Marketing, Sales, Customer service, Procurement, HR, Supply Chain, and all other departments. This involves implementing software solutions (SaaS) or cloud apps , such as e-commerce platforms, ERP systems, CRM, PIM, WMS, POS, marketing automation apps, or other systems. Essentially, these applications that companies implement become part of their IT ecosystem.
Implementing these apps helps automate a plethora of costly, time-consuming, and manual repetitive work processes such as hiring, emailing, invoicing, product information optimization, inventory updates, customer relationship management, and thousands of business processes across various departments. This digitalized automation helps boost operational efficiency, it improves focus on revenue-generating core business activities, and above all, it results in more accessible and real-time customer experiences.
To add to this, the expectations and demands of customers for digital services and real-time experiences are also evolving, further driving the need for companies to integrate new applications. The absence of an e-commerce platform, email automation solution, or multiple payment option integrations can negatively impact how customers perceive a brand and its services.
Executives say digital transformation’s top benefits include improvement of operational efficiency (40%), faster time to market (36%), and meeting customer expectations (35%)."
… But digital transformation can also end up in complex entanglements
While implementing multiple applications to enable digital transformation and business automation in the short term, in the long term it leads to a plateful of problems. Namely, “Software Spaghetti” problems.
The more applications that a business implements and integrates, the more challenging it becomes to manage these connections and the resulting data exchange. This leads to an increasingly entangled IT ecosystem. Such an entangled IT ecosystem consists of data silos and a jungle of crisscrossing data flows. It also involves many partially connected software solutions, managed by multiple integration partners, overlapping and connecting to each other in a disorganized fashion. Because of the imagery that such an entangled IT landscape evokes, it is also known as an ‘Software Spaghetti Ecosystem’.
So, the question is - how and when do these business-automating application integrations get ‘pasta’ point (pun intended) and turn into Software Spaghetti Nightmares? Read on to untangle the plot!
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How entangled IT ecosystems get formed without an iPaaS
The long-term effects of creating point-to-point software integrations with custom code
Here’s how it goes for most organizations attempting point-to-point integrations:
Since 2021, companies worlwide have been using an average amount of 110 SaaS (Software as a Service) applications”
To explore how organizations that set out on their digital transformation journey accidentally end up with an entangled IT ecosystem, riddled with data silos, let’s follow the hypothetical journey of a medium-sized enterprise called ‘Spaghetti X' (to stick to the analogy). This company already has an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system to manage core business processes, including inventory management, finance, supply chain data, operations, as well as HR and payroll functionalities.
Fortunate enough to grow over the years, ‘Spaghetti X’ has successfully opened stores at multiple locations. However, after the Covid-19 crisis, Spaghetti X realized the need for selling its products digitally and created an e-commerce shop. However, in order to optimize their e-commerce experience and automate their orders, deliveries, inventory, pricing, and customer data in real-time, the company decides to integrate this e-commerce store with its ERP system. With the start of this integration project, 'Spaghetti X' begins its journey in creating an integrated IT ecosystem without any scalable infrastructure.
Phase 1: Creating the first software integration as a one-time project
In the case of our hypothetical scenario, the company - ‘Spaghetti X’ puts together a project team to find the best solution to plan, execute, and monitor the point-to-point ERP to e-commerce integration.
Software or system integrations are traditionally created by custom code or plugins, which can only be developed and managed by coding experts or integration specialists, making it an expensive and time-consuming endeavor. However, operating on a project-thinking mentality, the scope appears to be limited to this 1:1 integration for now, and even though it will require senior developers to manage and maintain this custom-code integration, it appears to be a sustainable cost to bear.
The project team researches prospective solutions and finds an integration partner to create a point-to-point (custom-code) connection with the ERP system and e-commerce website of ‘Spaghetti X’. Despite being costly and time-consuming, this approach delivers a result that the management of Spaghetti X is satisfied with. Since it’s a relatively straightforward 1:1 integration, no major data flow issues, data silos, or complex troubleshooting is anticipated at this stage. There aren’t any data security and privacy compliance issues. What could possibly go wrong, right?
50% of organizations cite an integrated application, or a feature within the app, getting discontinued as a challenge when maintaining integrations"
Creating point-to-point integrations without integration infrastructure leads to:
Re-platforming risks in the long-term.
Difficulty in integrating more applications in the future.
Growing data silos and data errors.
Lack of data security and privacy compliance.
The need for senior developer to govern and troubleshoot integrations.
Phase 2: The integrations start to grow and start to get entangled
At this phase, our hypothetical business, Spaghetti X has progressed in its digital transformation journey to a successful, rapidly growing e-commerce business. However, as their product catalog keeps expanding and evolving, along with their rapidly growing customer base, they realize they now need a solution to manage and enrich their product data and another solution to manage customer support. As a result, they decide to connect a PIM (Product Information Management) and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solution to their existing ERP-e-commerce integration. All of a sudden, the number of software integrations within the IT ecosystem of Spaghetti X has doubled.
Following its project-based approach, the company employs more specialized integration partners to develop custom-code integrations to include the new CRM and PIM system. This amounts to an all-new expensive and time-consuming integration project that can only be managed (after being developed) by senior developers, coding experts, or integration specialists. Thus, while these new integrations help solve the immediate concerns of the company’s e-commerce platform, the increased number of integrations become significantly harder and more expensive to manage. A while after the integrations are well-established, data flow issues occur, orders get lost, and customer interactions are not captured properly. Product information is not consistently synchronized across all integrated endpoints and data gets stored in several locations, resulting in troublesome data silos.
Market study reveals 89% of companies struggle with data and system integration; driving middleware adoption”
One of the major causes of delay in resolving these integration errors is that the integrations are created by custom code. This means only senior developers can identify and resolve these errors and the company is dependent on the external integration partners it has employed to fix the issues. .
During this phase, most businesses realize they need a middleware solution because:
Phase 3: Switching from entangled integrations to a future-proof integration solution
Ignoring the increased integration difficulties and maintenance costs, the application integrations themselves significantly benefit the Spaghetti X business, as they automate several work processes and eliminate a lot of manual data entry. Therefore, during this phase, most growing companies fall into the trap of thinking the only way forward is to keep creating more custom-coded application integrations.
Thus, either by expanding their IT team or by investing more money in integration specialists, our hypothetical company - Spaghetti X - attempts to solve its increasing business problems by creating newer integrations to automate even more business processes. The business now ends up developing new integrations with a Marketing system to enhance its product promotions, a chatbot to improve its customer service, a WMS (Warehouse Management Software) to improve its inventory and supply chain management, and so forth. All of these poorly connected applications and data flows crisscrossing all over the IT ecosystem, finally starts to manifest as the ‘Software Spaghetti nightmare’ it was bound to be.
During this phase, businesses identify the need for a future-proof integration solution because:
The ironic reality of this messy scenario is that the massive development and maintenance costs of all these point-to-point integrations, significantly diminish the financial benefits they entail. Turning into an operational nightmare with multiple partners managing and troubleshooting these many application integrations, these custom code integrations start to inadvertently slow down the business' digital growth.
Usually, around this phase, the C-level of the company or IT experts realize the need for a more holistic integration solution and to create a future-proof infrastructure for developing and managing software integrations. As such, the company starts to look for an integration solution that can help organize and untangle their IT ecosystem. A solution that can standardize, streamline , and synchronize all integrated data and workflows, while simplifying how these application integrations are governed and developed over time. This leads most organizations to discover a next-gen middleware solution like the Alumio iPaaS.
Introducing the iPaaS to untangle the IT ecosystem
Leverage next-gen technology with a future-proof integration solution
By making all integrations and data flows visible on one interface and by eliminating the need to create or manage integrations by custom code, the Alumio iPaaS makes software integrations accessible to business users, project managers and non-coding professionals. Synchronizing data access across all integrations in real-time, it eliminates data silos and inconsistencies, while providing valuable data insights. The Alumio iPaaS also specializes in supporting EDI integrations and allows you to map data across many file formats such as JSON, Edifact, X12, CSV, XML, cXML, helping seamlessly integrate and standardize data exchange between suppliers, customers, and manufacturers.
But most importantly, by enabling users to build multi-point, API-led application integrations instead of point-to-point custom code integrations, the Alumio iPaaS allows businesses to add new integrations limitlessly, without having to worry about starting long and complex custom code integration projects, or employing solution experts for each new application. Alumio provides a rich library of Connectors (pre-configured application data) that enables faster integrations with popular ERP systems, e-commerce platforms, CRM, PIM, WMS, marketing automation apps, marketplace feed management tools, and more.
Through all of this and more, the Alumio iPaaS ensures a fully integrated, automated, and most importantly - untangled IT ecosystem. Thus, in context to the ‘Software Spaghetti’ analogy, the iPaaS enables modern businesses to - as a rendition of the popular cake phrase - “have their pasta and eat it too”.
The benefits of using the Alumio iPaaS to create a future-proof, untangled IT ecosystem:
Making all application integrations visible on one user-friendly interface, the iPaaS allows developers, project managers and C-level to quite literally be on the same page while planning integrations.
Build smart workflows within Alumio to automate millions of processes across integrated systems. Schedule data exchange, sync data, detect errors in real-time, retry or skip automated processes, and much more.
Access a rich collection of data transformers to customize data and integrations limitlessly. Convert data formats. Map fields and attributes. Enrich, filter, re-route, standardize data, and much more.
The Alumio iPaaS is an ISO 27001-certified solution that centralizes all integrations on one secure, cloud-native environment, and enables privacy compliance with legalization like GDPR, CCPA, HIPPA, SOC2, and more.
By eliminating the need to create custom-code integrations, the Alumio iPaaS provides a user-friendly interface that non-coding professionals or junior developers can use to manage or modify integrations.
The Alumio iPaaS automatically logs every action, detects errors and API conflicts in real-time, and allows you to set custom monitoring alerts to detect specific or general integration anomalies, further reducing operational costs.
Providing caching capabilities and reactivation procedures in case of system crashes in the integrated endpoints, the Alumio iPaaS ensures business continuity and the capacity to manage huge data loads.
Avoid system downtime and ensure business continuity with caching capabilities, data buffering, and reactivation procedures for your integrations and IT ecosystem.
Conclusion
To finally plate up and serve this “Software Spaghetti” story that we’ve been slow-cooking, in conclusion: achieving digital transformation and business automation through application integrations is just one part of the story. To develop, govern, and orchestrate these integrations you need the right IT infrastructure and a future-proof integration solution. The Alumio iPaaS is specifically designed for this purpose - to be a fast, flexible, and scalable integration platform that businesses or agencies and system integrators can use - to make integration simple. Most importantly, it provides the limitless scalability and API-driven infrastructure that’s needed to allow businesses limitlessly add and modify application integrations as they grow, without any loss of data integrity, developing an IT ecosystem that’s integrated but untangled.
