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 eCommerce, ERP, PIM, CRM and many other such systems, the number of these applications that businesses have to integrate with is ever increasing. However, many businesses choose 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 and black boxes. Thus, the true challenge lies in ‘How’ to create these software integrations for business automation.
An iPaaS (integration Platform as a Service) is a next-gen, cloud-based platform that helps integrate software, cloud applications and data, via a user-friendly interface. It provides the right infrastructure, a dedicated cloud environment and the automated tools 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.
Discovering the challenges of digital transformation
Digitally transformed organizations are projected to contribute to more than half of the global gross domestic product (GDP) by 2023, accounting for $53.3 trillion."
It all starts with the need for digital transformation…
Digital transformation involves integrating digital technology with all the business processes of a company, from Marketing, Sales, Customer service, Procurement, HR and all other departments. In order to do so, businesses integrate with software solutions (SaaS) or cloud applications for digital growth, such as eCommerce, PIM, CRM, WMS, POS or other systems. Essentially, these software solutions that companies integrate become part of their IT ecosystem.
Connecting with these applications 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 a thousand odd more business processes across various departments. This digital automation helps significantly boost employee-worktime optimization, it improves focus on revenue-generating core business activities and above all, it results in more accessible, valuable and real-time customer experiences.
To add to this, the expectations and demands of customers for digital and real-time services are also evolving, further driving the need for companies to integrate new software solutions. The absence of an eCommerce platform, email automation, 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 connecting to software solutions enables digital transformation and business automation in the short term, in the long term it leads to a more complicated problem.
With each new software solution that a business integrates with, 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 ecosystem evokes, it is also known as an ‘IT Spaghetti ecosystem’.
So, the question is - how and when do these business-automating software integrations get ‘pasta’ point (pun intended) when they turn into IT Spaghetti Nightmares?
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How entangled IT ecosystems get formed
The long-term effects of creating point-to-point software integrations with custom code
Here’s how it goes for most organizations…
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 HR and payroll functionalities.
Fortunate enough to grow over the years, ‘Spaghetti X’ has successfully opened stores at multiple locations. After the Covid-19 crisis, Spaghetti X realized the need for selling its products digitally and created an eCommerce shop. However, in order to optimize their eCommerce experience and automate their orders, deliveries, inventory and customer data in real-time, the company decides to integrate the webshop 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 eCommerce 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 eCommerce website of ‘Spaghetti X’. Albeit 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 troubleshooting is anticipated. There aren’t any data security and privacy compliance issues. What could possibly go wrong, right?
Businesses identified “capturing time/costs against projects” as their biggest project management challenge."
Due to the limited project scope in this phase, the management of the company isn’t preparing for:
Re-platforming
Growing Data Silos
Undetected integration hiccups
Data Security and Privacy Compliance
Creating scalable infrastructure for future integrations
Phase 2: The integrations grow and start to get entangled
Our hypothetical business, Spaghetti X has progressed in its digital transformation journey to a successful, rapidly growing e-commerce business. However, as the orders keep increasing by the day, keeping track of customer information, product-related queries, requests and complaints by customers becomes increasingly challenging. It starts to take a toll on the company’s customer service team and the slow response time is resulting in dissatisfied customers. At the same time, while competitor web shops have better and more detailed ways of showcasing their products, the Spaghetti X e-commerce platform is very limited in the options it provides for product information optimization.
To tackle these new major issues, the company subsequently decides to connect new software solutions to their e-commerce-ERP integration. To significantly improve and automate responses to customer queries and complaints, the company decides to integrate a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solution as a user-friendly touchpoint on the e-commerce webshop. At the same time, in order to enrich and optimize their product details and descriptions, they choose to also integrate with a popular PIM (Product Information Management) solution. All of a sudden, the number of software integrations within the IT ecosystem of Spaghetti X has doubled.
Still following its project-based approach, the company employs more specialized integration partners to create custom-code integrations between the new CRM solution and PIM system along with the current e-commerce-ERP integration. 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.
While these new integrations help solve the immediate concerns of the company’s e-commerce platform, the increased number of integrations become significantly harder to manage. Even 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 displayed in all connected endpoints and data gets stored in several locations, resulting in troublesome data silos.
... the greatest challenge organizations face in meeting their marketing and sales objectives is managing data and sharing insights that drive actions across organizational silos.”
One of the major causes of delay in resolving these integration errors is that the integrations are created by custom code. This means only coding experts can identify and resolve these errors and the company is dependent on the external integration partners it has employed, to fix the issues. Usually, around this phase, the IT experts of the company or C-Level manage to identify the need for a more holistic integration solution or for creating a future-proof infrastructure for developing and managing software integrations.
This phase is marked by:
Phase 3: Switching from entangled integrations to future-proof IT infrastructure
Ignoring the increased integration difficulties and maintenance costs, the software solutions themselves significantly benefit the business by improving work processes and boosting productivity. Therefore, during this phase, most growing companies fall into the trap of believing that the only way forward is to keep creating these custom-coded software integrations.
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 software solutions and data flows crisscrossing all over the IT ecosystem of the business, finally starts to manifest as the ‘IT Spaghetti Nightmare’ it was bound to be.
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 that they entail. Having turned into an operational nightmare with multiple partners managing and troubleshooting these many software integrations, these custom code integrations start to inadvertently slow down the business' digital growth.
Realizing their predicament, the company starts to look for an integration solution that can help organize and untangle their IT ecosystem. A solution that can standardize and streamline all their connected data, and simplify how these software integrations are managed. The only future-proof and holistic, next-gen integration solution that such a search leads to is the ‘integration Platform as a Service’, also known as 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.
Providing seamless real-time data access across all connected software or systems, it eliminates data silos and provides 360-degree data insights. The Alumio iPaaS also 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 integrate software via its user interface instead of through custom code, the iPaaS allows businesses to add multiple software integrations without having to start long and complex custom code integration projects, and also without any loss of data integrity. Through all of this and more, an iPaaS ensures a fully connected and seamlessly scalable untangled IT ecosystem. Thus, in context to the ‘IT Spaghetti ecosystem’ analogy, an iPaaS provides businesses with a solution that enables them to - as a rendition of the popular cake phrase goes - “have their pasta and eat it too”.
The technical advantages of making use of the Alumio iPaaS solution to create a future-proof and untangled IT ecosystem:
Making all software 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.
The Alumio iPaaS also provides a dedicated environment to host all your integrations and data privately, with added security and without any limit on data routes, endpoints, etc.
By eliminating the need to create custom-code integrations, the iPaaS provides a user-friendly interface that non-coding professionals or junior developers can use to manage or modify integrations.
Detect, get notified, and resolve integration errors and API conflicts quickly using the iPaaS interface and reduce the business impact of faulty integrations.
Providing caching capabilities and reactivation procedures in case of system crashes in the connected endpoints, the Alumio iPaaS ensures business continuity and capacity to manage huge data loads.
Organize a secure IT ecosystem that is able to act upon any worst-case scenario. Buffer all data, quickly change connected systems and ensure your data security complies with privacy legislation like GDPR.
Conclusion
To finally plate up and serve this spaghetti story that we’ve been spinning, in conclusion: achieving digital transformation and business automation through software integrations is just one part of the story. To create these integrations you need the right IT infrastructure and a future-proof integration solution. An 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. It is a platform where all the software solutions you need can integrate seamlessly, speak the same language and come together to work in tandem and untangled.
how Alumio’s iPaaS can help you create a fast, flexible and future-proof IT ecosystem?
