#enterprise integration solution

Successful integration of the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) ecosystem helps increase collaboration and effectiveness of the delivery ecosystem. As all teams have right information at the right time in the right format, the data can be analysed in its entirety to take wiser, well-thought decisions. However, a good integration solution does not only offer connectivity and collaboration for the current business processes, it also helps in future-proofing the product delivery and customer success ecosystem by simplifying the transition to modern systems and newer business circumstances.

In this article, you will learn how the right integration solution would simplify the process of system and process transition for an organization.

Situation 1: When you need to upgrade the ecosystem

Imagine yourself in the following situation.

Your current project management system does not support your newer, agile business processes. You want to a switch to a modern, agile system. However, due to multiple risks such as data loss, expected downtime, and the newer systems incompatibility with other systems in the ecosystem, you are hesitant to make this switch.

Now the situation described above is a common situation for every organization at an interval of 3-5 years. Systems become outdated, new processes come in place, and transitions, though necessary, come with a lot of hassle.

However, with the right integration solution, organizations can ensure that these transitions are smooth and hassle free. Are you wondering, how?

You won’t have to worry about data loss or system downtime: A good integration solution must also act as a good migration solution. After all, migration is a subset of integration. An integration solution that ensures that data is successfully transferred from the old system to the new system ensures that older data is not lost or difficult to trace during transition. A solution that allows migration to happen while both the systems are in use also help organizations save the precious days lost in switching to a new system.

You are free to choose any new system: As you are sure that your integration solution will help integrate your new system with rest of the ecosystem, you will not have to worry about system-to-system compatibility. So, when your business processes change or upgrade, you can choose the best-of-breed system of your choice and not depend upon a single vendor system for compatibility reasons.

When all the test cases pass, the QA team closest the requirement, while keeping the product team in loop for all these changes in real time.

Situation 2: When business processes change or upgrade

Imagine yourself in the following situation.

Your company is going to acquire three small companies. Each company uses a different project management system. You need data from all these systems in your system for compliance reasons. Also, from a coordination point of view, you need these companies to switch to the project management system that you are using.

With the right integration solution, it would be easier for companies to migrate the information for compliance requirements. You will also be able to simultaneously use all the project management systems until all organizations that you have acquired are familiar with the system of your choice.

You won’t have to worry about compliance: A good integration solution will offer traceability for work-items as well as non-work items. Once you migrate the data to your system, you will be able to successfully access the historical information related to all the transactions that have happened in the past. This will easily help you fulfil even the most complex compliance regulations.

You will not be forced to do a hard cut over: If you are free to use both old as well as new systems simultaneously, you can train the new workforce in batches to use the new system. To begin with you can migrate the non-business critical projects and once they are successfully transferred, you can switch to critical business projects. This would ensure that the acquisition is not disruptive for the business.

New technological advancements and innovative business processes keep any business ahead of its competitors. However, it is also imperative that these advancements are introduced in the organization in a way that they do not cause any chaos. A good integration solution plays a significant role in ensuring that these transitions are not only successful with zero downtime and least disruption.

Why you should consider OpsHub Integration Manager

OpsHub Integration Manager comes with all the features that will help you make a successful system as well as process transition. With the ability to integrate 50+ ALM, CRM, ITSM, and DevOps systems and features such as complete history preservation, failure management, conflict resolution, and automatic recover for in-flight failures, OpsHub Integration Manager ensures that your business is ready for all sorts of future transitions.

When you identify the need of integrating your Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) ecosystem, the first and foremost question that comes to your mind is: whether to build or buy an integration solution. Building software has been the preferred choice in the past, but with introduction of holistic, out-of-box software that can also be customized as per customer’s requirement and can be deployed in multiple ways, the tables are now turning. However, as integration is still a relatively new space and organizations have only recently started to realize it’s importance, there is great deal of confusion about what an organization should expect from a good integration solution.

In this blog, we will, therefore, focus on two key areas: what should be your expectation from a good enterprise-class integration solution and whether or not it’s a good idea for you to build an integration solution from scratch.

Features of holistic, enterprise-class integration solution

A good integration solution is the backbone of a highly productive and collaborative ecosystem. Therefore, it’s very important to buy or build an integration solution keeping in mind that it is reliable and can withstand changing business needs. The reliability of an integration solution is dependent on multiple factors. However, the four primary factors that you must consider are: the kind of consistency the integration solution provides while synchronizing the data between multiple systems, the kind of failure recovery & reconciliation mechanism it offers, the level of audit it does in case of changes, and its ability to support scalability of the ecosystem.

Consistency in data synchronization

Robust failure recovery mechanism

Scalability in future: Managing more systems + people + business

Reliable data security and secure user access mechanisms

So, build or buy?

While the choice between: going with an inbuilt integration provided with a solution, building an integration solution from scratch, or buying an out-of-box integration platform is yours, you must weigh the integration solution on the reliability factors discussed above. You also must consider the aspects listed below and analyze the integration strategy you plan to use with respect to your requirements before zeroing on building the solution or buying it off the shelf:

1 – Availability of an out-of-box integration solution:

The first thing that you must find out is whether or not there is an integration solution in the market that caters to your needs.

If there is already a comprehensive integration solution available in the market that fits into your requirements or can be customized to meet your requirements, you must consider it.

Being open to the idea of customizing the integration solution as per your requirements would open a door of immense, budget-friendly possibilities for your organization.

You must also check whether the integration solution you are planning to buy is being used by other reputed organizations in your domain. The clientele on the Integration Solution Vendors’ (ISV) website will give you a great insight into who all in the industry have chosen to go with this solution instead of building their own.

In today’s time, the belief that majority of out-of-the-box software do not allow customization in a meaningful manner doesn’t longer hold true.

2 – The time and budget you have in hand:

Building an inhouse integration solution takes a great deal of time. Therefore, if your need for an integration solution is urgent and time bound, building one from scratch may not be the best idea. Even if you put a lot of time and money into building the integration solution, until you are an expert in the domain with extensive experience, there is no guarantee that the solution you are making will be successful.

Though prima facie, the process of integrating two systems looks very easy by simply connecting the APIs of the source and target systems, the key question you should ask yourself is, ‘what kind of integration solution you need?’ If you just want your immediate integration needs to be addressed partially, you can go with the idea of building a minimal viable integration workaround in-house. However, if you are looking at integration as a strategy to simplify collaboration in your ecosystem, building a minimal viable integration workaround will not be enough.

3 – Technological competence to keep the solution up-to-date:

Unlike a decade back, software vendors, today, don’t follow bi-annual or annual cycles to release the upgraded versions of their software.

Upgradation can be as frequent as weekly or monthly. The react software. Therefore, before building an integration solution, you must ensure that your in-house team is technically equipped, prepared, and available to make frequent changes to your in-house integration solution. Advance planning not only makes it easier to adopt new features/releases but also significantly improve time to value.

4 – The impact of the investment on your core business:

Apart from niche skills and efforts required to design an integration solution, the collaboration between Integration Solution Vendors (ISVs) and software providers give the vendors an edge over inhouse integration solutions when it comes to testing pre-release copies or updates.

Therefore, if your core business is to create something else, it’s not worth investing time to develop an integration solution at the expense of your core business. It would instead be better for you to invest the time and money in enhancing your core business.

5 – Consider scalability in the long run:

Periodic changes in business processes, priorities, and models is common. These changes impact the way in which teams your organization and the corresponding systems interact.

In a situation like this, re-aligning the integration of all the systems and addition of new systems in the integration fold can become cumbersome. Most of Integration Solution Vendors (ISVs) are however ready to immediately accommodate such changes because they work with multiple software vendors and enterprises to deliver integration solution for multiple systems & different kinds of business processes.

Is your inhouse integration solution equipped to manage?

Common issues with a minimal viable integration workaround

There are multiple such cases in which software providers whose core competence is something else came up with integration solutions, but with critical issues that can’t be ignored. The most common issues that these minimal viable integration workarounds have are as follows:

Limited integration capability: More often than not, these integration solutions have limited capability when it comes to integrating different kinds of systems, entities, and servers. Absence of advance integration features such as workflow transition and mapping of different kinds fields creates multiple issues in the long run.

Inconsistent synchronization: Inconsistent synchronization leads to data duplicity, data corruption, and conflicts in the source and target systems. In absence of a dedicated feature for detecting and manging conflicts and errors, it becomes cumbersome to go through multiple log files to detect and resolve the conflicts and errors. Issues like this don’t only affect the scope of scalability, they can also lead to significant monetary loss.

Serious security loopholes: With no dedicated mechanism in place to guarantee data security and secure user access, critical data being synchronized through these integration solutions is often vulnerable to hacking and similar malpractices.

Conclusion

The two key aspects that you must consider while making the build versus buy choice is:

The need for software integration is well-established. We discussed about how a well-unified ecosystem helps enterprises deliver phenomenal customer experience in one of our previous blogs. Every enterprise that works with multiple systems and cross-functional teams realizes at some point the need for integrating their Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and DevOps systems to accelerate delivery and provide a holistic customer experience. A good integration solution (the features of which we have discussed here) not only brings collaboration but also leverages the functional richness of the individual systems to create a highly productive and collaborative ecosystem.

The need for software integration is well-established. We discussed about how a well-unified ecosystem helps enterprises deliver phenomenal customer experience in one of our previous blogs. Every enterprise that works with multiple systems and cross-functional teams realizes at some point the need for integrating their Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and DevOps systems to accelerate delivery and provide a holistic customer experience. A good integration solution (the features of which we have discussed here) not only brings collaboration but also leverages the functional richness of the individual systems to create a highly productive and collaborative ecosystem.

In case of application development ecosystem, integration within the ecosystem and with the operations teams brings the spotlight on the business priorities and helps cross-functional teams, cumulatively, deliver high quality products and brilliant customer experience. In this blog, we will discuss the factors that an enterprise whose core focus is something other than integration should consider when they decide on building an enterprise integration solution. We will also discuss why buying an off-the-shelf enterprise integration solution can be a wise choice.

Factors enterprises must consider when building an enterprise integration solution inhouse

Creating an enterprise integration solution is a complex task. It involves the understanding of the architecture of multiple systems, the uniqueness, features, and flaws of these systems, and the challenges in making them successfully work together. When enterprises decide on building an inhouse integration solution, their vision is mostly limited to their own ecosystem. Therefore, sometimes, they fail to consider the factors which, if ignored, will create issues over long term, the cost of fixing these issues and the impact on their teams’ productivity due to these issues. These factors are: scalability, complete traceability, failure recovery mechanism, system upgrades, and change in business processes.

Scalability in future: Managing more systems + people + business

Usually, the first problem that an enterprise faces with an inhouse integration solution is the solution’s inability to scale up to meet the new requirements. Scalability might be needed for multiple reasons such as:

Addition of more users in the ecosystem due to business expansion

Addition of more projects due to growing data/clientele

Addition of new systems for newer business needs

Now, as the initial integration design was not designed with the above needs in mind, such kind of updates typically require a full-blown project again to find a new solution. It becomes a time-consuming task specially when customizations are required to add new users, projects, or systems. For example, sometimes the new system being introduced in the ecosystem has no similarity with the with the already integrated systems and requires additional backend work to integrate with the existing ecosystem. More importantly, the delay caused due to enterprise’s inability to consider the future needs for scalability, sometimes, impacts the successful execution of a critical project.

Another key reason why enterprises can’t ignore the need of scalability in future is because as the team sizes grow, there would a need to successfully handle concurrent updates. The integration solution must be able to handle the concurrent flow of data from multiple systems without errors and failures.

To create an integration solution that is scalable for future needs is a specialized, time-consuming process, and requires a system development mindset.

Enterprises such as OpsHub dedicate a lot of time researching and working on ways to support multiple types of systems and keep their integration solution ready for future scalability. The out-of-box integration solution offered by OpsHub also comes with multiple deployment options, such as on-premise, on cloud, or both – a feature that is difficult to create inhouse.

Complete traceability: Rich context about data in the ecosystem + Regulatory compliance adherence

Complete traceability is important for richer collaboration and reliable decision making. An integration solution, designed to provide complete traceability for all work and non-work items, helps stakeholders put right quality checks in place and get holistic context of the data present in the ecosystem. Traceability is constructed piecewise in multiple, disparate systems and a good integration solution should be able to consolidate all the pieces of information. Lack of this sort of traceability not only affects productivity but also leads to breach of regulatory compliance requirements in industries such as finance and aviation.

Now, a minimal viable integration workaround that enterprises create inhouse to connect two systems will never be able to support complete traceability for all work and non-work items due to its poor design approach. Approaches such as API call approach that enterprises generally use to create inhouse integration solutions or, the otherwise slightly better, file systems approach do not support the kind of traceability that’s actually needed to create a unified ecosystem with 100% traceability of all items.

A robust failure recovery mechanism: Safe data + Secure transactions

Inflight failures when parallel streams of concurrent updates are coming from disparate sources (which is a common phenomenon in an ALM ecosystem) can be a nightmare if the integration solution doesn’t have a reliable failure recovery mechanism in place. It can lead to loss or corruption of critical customer data. Therefore, it is critical for the integration solution to support automatic recovery in case of a failure and ensure eventual data consistency across the ecosystem.

However, this kind of robust failure mechanism is impossible for an integration solution if it doesn’t keep a record of the transient states of all transactions happening across in the ecosystem in an audit log.

Now, handling failure efficiently is certainly not the top-of-the-mind feature when an integration solution is built inhouse. Therefore, it is common for these solutions to run into issues such as data corruption due to temporary system failure, connection loss between the two systems, or unexpected changes in mapping.

Robust integration solution such as OpsHub Integration Manager have robust failure recovery mechanism that queues up failures for resolution even when an end system is unavailable/down for a while. In the failure recovery mechanism designed by OpsHub, failed events are processed automatically and could also be processed manually by administrators.

System upgrades: Readiness to handle API changes + Feature enhancements

Unlike a decade back, enterprises, today, don’t follow bi-annual or annual cycles to release the upgraded versions of their software. Upgradation can be as frequent as weekly or monthly. Therefore, enterprises must always be prepared to ensure that the inhouse solution is always compatible with the new version(s). The preparedness could be: a) being ready to manage the upcoming changes in the software solutions or b) being familiar with the pre-release version of the software solutions. Advance planning not only makes it easier to adopt new features/releases but also significantly improve time to value. The reaction time to changes becomes even more critical when enterprises are dealing with Software as a service (SaaS) products and they don’t have the luxury to wait before adopting the latest release.

Change in business process: Re-evaluation of the existing systemic integration

Evolving business priorities, changing business needs, or change in the business model can impact the way two teams within an enterprise and their corresponding systems interact with each other. This, in turn, calls for a re-evaluation of the existing systemic integration in the ecosystem. For example, an integration solution designed on direct API call-out approach will need additional development to support even minor changes in the business processes. The process of development, testing, and deployment will not only add to the maintenance cost but also disrupt the business, sometimes for long periods. The trigger-based integration approach that OpsHub follows is thoughtfully designed to manage such high-level business changes. The robust integration approach that OpsHub follows allows enterprises to make minor mapping updates to keep the integration up and running even in case of major business process changes.

In short, designing a robust integration solution is a complex task When an enterprise realizes the need for integrating its ecosystem or integrating two or more systems, their default reaction is, ‘Yes! Let’s just create one inhouse’.

Prima facie, the process of connecting two or more systems looks very simple. Checking the APIs of the source and the target systems, and using the APIs to integrate the systems can be done by an enterprise’s inhouse team – if not perfectly, at least to an extent where the immediate needs for integration can be addressed. The idea of developing an integration solution inhouse sounds faster, cheaper, and easier to handle as compared to going all over looking for a vendor that understands the enterprise’s exclusive needs until enterprises consider incorporating the five critical factors we discussed in this article in their inhouse solution.

Even after putting all the money and effort, an enterprise not specialized in creating an integration solution can’t be sure that they have built an integration solution better than an integration solution available off the shelf with a vendor.

Apart from niche skills and efforts required to design an integration solution, the collaboration between integration solution vendors and software providers to keep the integration solution ready latest for all latest releases give the vendors an edge over inhouse integration solutions. Therefore, if the core focus of an enterprise is not to create an integration solution – it is not worth investing years to develop an expertise in creating integration solutions.