February 25, 2022
Nowadays technology drives every aspect of modern businesses. With more and more niche products coming onto the scene and businesses growing faster than ever. They are also investing more and more into applications.
With businesses opting for more technology added to the ecosystem, interoperability becomes more of a challenge. With this in mind, building a successful operating ecosystem means streamlining your network of integrations.
And it’s time to think beyond the standard rigid point-to-point integration.
Although out of the box integrations may seem great to start with. With simple configuration, and a small amount of custom code to get up and running. Everything seems great until you need to connect more than just a few software systems. It starts to get complex due to the lack of scalability, the cost and resources needed to maintain the existing and ongoing work. And it limits your ability to build new, market differentiating products on top of your existing data.
As businesses evolve, so does technology. Technology is no longer supported by one central area owned by IT, these days there are many choices of SAAS tools on the market to achieve their business needs.
Departments in companies are now able to freely choose what they need, from HR sourcing talent management products to the sales team exploring new management and prospecting tools. As companies start adopting the use of SAAS tools, the tech ecosystem grows in complexity requiring more and more integrations to be put into place.
Unfortunately point-to-point integrations are just not designed to keep up.
You can easily get locked in to a piece of software simply because of how many things it’s connected to. And over time it causes the ecosystem to become a tangled web of connections making it difficult to maintain or to fix if any one connection fails.
Because of the point-point’s brittle nature. Modifying connections and endpoints can become a daunting task as even the slightest mistake can break the entire system. Businesses lose their flexibility to swap out legacy software or simply introduce new tools to trial or to grow with them as a multitude of new integrations would require development time and cost.
Point-to-point integrations restrict you from storing, extracting or analysing data as a whole. In fact everything operates in a silo. This can be problematic as analysing data from one piece of software at a time, crucial data will be missed.
Fortunately there is a better way to integrate your apps and move data between them. And that’s via a pub/sub messaging in a data hub.
When an integration layer is built, the systems are all connected to one another through a central platform. They communicate to each other using a publication-subscription pattern in place of the standard messaging queue. This allows information to be pushed out immediately to those who are subscribed. In addition, when a new system or tool needs that data, it can simply subscribe to the existing data stream.
This integration pattern is the one to adopt if you want to grow fast and add new capabilities to your business easily. Although it is slower to implement initially, it’s faster in the long run as you start adding more systems to the hub.
The flexibility of this pattern means that you can shape your integrations around your business processes. And with the pub-sub model, connecting new systems is simple. Nothing in your existing ecosystem would need to change and just one connection is needed to make the magic happen!
You’re able to see what’s happening thanks to the abstraction layer. The built in data hub allows you to centralize your business data and leverage analytics tools. With better insights into your business processes, it’ll help identify areas where your business is inefficient, opportunities for improvement and most importantly – growth.
An integration layer and pub/sub messaging pattern opens up a world of possibilities. It removes the impracticality of the point-to-point integration web, allows for new systems and with the added centralized data hub, scaling your business has never been easier.
Let’s talk about your goals and ambitions to grow your business, and see if implementing a pub-sub layer is the one for you.
Gone are the days of tangled point-to-point integrations.
And say hello to the days of data communication.
If you are ready to take your business to the next level, drop us a message below and we can discuss how to improve your tech landscape.
