Automating the integration journey with Alumio
What is the integration journey for modern businesses?
Custom code integrations vs. the “integration Platform as a Service”
In the quest to digitally transform and automate business processes, when businesses identify what systems, software solutions, cloud apps, or data sources they wish to integrate, their integration journey begins! At one point, businesses would mainly integrate only two or three systems, which would usually involve an ERP to E-commerce connection. However, with the explosion of new SaaS solutions and cloud apps, businesses are now challenged to deliver product experiences and customer service across multiple channels. This involves integrating other solutions like PIM (Product Information Management), CRM (Customer Relationship Management), WMS (Warehouse Management Software), POS (Point of Sales) systems, Marketing automation software, and more.
Thus, a key defining factor in the integration journey for businesses is Time to Market (TTM), which is determined by how fast and seamlessly companies can integrate two or multiple applications. In this regard, to understand how the integration journey has evolved over the years, let’s compare how businesses traditionally built system integrations, in contrast with most of them now starting to implement the “integration Platform as a Service”, or iPaaS solutions, such as the Alumio iPaaS.
The time-consuming integration journey with custom code
Let’s take the common integration use case that involves an enterprise wanting to connect its ERP system with an e-commerce platform to digitally grow its operations. Traditionally, they would employ their IT teams or system integrators to connect these two systems with custom code in a point-to-point fashion. Apart from writing bespoke code, this involved developing a framework from scratch to create, manage, and monitor the integration. This is costly, time-consuming, and requires expensive and valuable senior developers to govern and troubleshoot the connections constantly.
Here’s what the integration journey with custom code looks like:
As you can see from the “integration coding process” above, it takes a significant time to even get a 1:1 integration off the ground. And then it takes even more time to develop and test the integration before taking it to market. Here are some business critical cons due to which this integration method isn’t feasible for modern businesses:
X No ownership and control of integrations
X A one-off investment with risky project timelines
X Hidden running costs for hosting and future development efforts
X Lack of flexibility in reusing, changing, or expanding integrations
X Long lead times due to extensive development cycles
Most importantly, the biggest issue with custom code integrations is that integrating more software solutions or applications involves starting a whole new integration project. Furthermore, data sharing within custom code integrations is prone to human error, isn’t always real-time, and can result in more data silos the more you expand your integrations.
In contrast, the benefits of implementing an integration platform is that it provides one scalable, cloud environment where businesses can freely add or interchange new software integrations, on top of existing ones, without fearing loss of data integrity. This is a distinguishing factor, since the exponential growth of e-commerce and the demand for omnichannel experiences calls for integrated commerce ecosystems (consisting of multiple integrations).
Read more about building integrations with custom code vs an iPaaS – a comparitive study in 2023.