Innovation & Integration

The case for fixed integration costs

When you are responsible for your business's financial well-being and guidance, visibility and predictability are your best friends in an otherwise unstable world! And that applies to both the solution deliverables and the cost to the business.

First, let’s talk about cost. While having constant visibility of integration usage and cost tracking through the dashboards provided by all the leading cloud vendors is great, it comes with uncertainty and eats away at your CAPEX. Whereas if you choose Integration as a Service (IaaS), your monthly costs are fixed and fall neatly into your OPEX basket. The other option, of course, is Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS). 

So, what’s the difference between iPaaS and IaaS in terms of investment? With iPaaS, the vendor delivers an integration platform, not the integrations. With iPaaS, you are responsible for building and maintaining the integrations you need. So you obviously need to attract, hire and retain skilled resources and shoulder the financial burden of internal support when an integration fails or misbehaves. While many iPaaS vendors promise easy drag-and-drop API functionality which allows even non-technical staff to integrate any application, the simplicity of configuring and maintaining the code behind these APIs is often overstated – and hiring a ‘rescue team’ can send costs spiralling out of control.

By comparison, IaaS vendors provide and maintain your integrations as part of the service. There are no resource costs at your end, no in-house time and effort required to maintain or support integrations, and you can choose a pay-as-you-go or subscription model to suit your business. And as the integrations are right first time, there are no ongoing maintenance and ‘fix’ costs.

The second point to consider is deliverables. In other words, the accurate and timely reporting you rely on professionally to do your job. While integration for many in the business may be out of sight, out of mind, as CFO, it’s always front of mind.

In an article by Paul Ainsworth, an international CFO with experience at large multinationals, he sums it up perfectly: “Access to timely, accurate data is a key enabler to finance productivity and decision support. Automated reporting and analytics allow more time to be dedicated to forecasting and predictive analysis. Technology will play an increasingly important role for the CFO, but its effectiveness depends on the accuracy, availability, and consistency of data, and on robust, integrated technology infrastructure.”

Why knowledge is power when it comes to integration

The ‘whys and wherefores’ of integration are well established. But even then, there’s integration and integration.

As data becomes more distributed, integrating large volumes of data from different sources, in disparate formats, and on a legacy system is a significant roadblock. In an age where it’s generally accepted that the average business transaction now crosses 35 different back-end systems, cost-effective and seamless integration is now a must-have, not a nice-to-have, for any organisation. Not only does it help ‘get things done’ in the most practical terms, but it drives more value from the systems you have in place.

And there’s an even bigger picture. Current research says that while 97% of organisations plan to undertake digital transformation initiatives, 84% will be held back by integration challenges. Meaning that removing the barriers around data and making it accessible is now business critical, as is providing the ability to automate repetitive tasks that contribute to general resource busyness but not the business’s bottom line. 

While your integration platform should largely do what it says on the packet, the small print makes a difference. For example, does your platform use a proprietary (rather than generic) logic in a proprietary development language? If so, every integration problem you have will begin and end with a unique construct requiring ongoing attention. And to do this cost-effectively, you need to attract, afford, recruit, and retain the in-house people you need to develop and support it.

And then, does your integration layer provide full visibility – from transactional insights to usage? How confident are you that when the CEO questions the accuracy of the data pulled into their reports, can you deliver an unequivocal assurance that ‘yes, all is well’? I.e., would you stake your professional reputation on it? Can you see if everything is working as it should and that if there is a point of failure, you - or better still, the integration owner - know about it, pronto?

If you’re like most CIOs, you hanker for insights on percentages of successes and failures, establishing where faults lie, and pinpointing and attributing spikes in data usage so you can control costs. Knowledge – and real-time answers to stakeholder questions – equals power.

Without a cloud-native integration layer or modern middleware, those tricky questions are more difficult to answer (and therefore to resolve), and development resources are harder to find and afford. While integration should help reduce your technical debt, without a single pane of glass of the value being delivered, it’s hard to measure the ROI of your investment in an age when accountability counts. 

Time to say goodbye to groundhog day  

If you remember the movie Groundhog Day, where the narcissistic lead character, Phil, is forced to relive the same 24 hours repeatedly until he changes himself and, therefore, his future, you probably have some sympathy. As COO, you may often deal with the same issues day after day – and it’s only by making changes and improvements to the status quo that you can move forward.

With your focus on efficiency, it’s easy to see where the time goes – but not always as easy to resolve. The circular motion of integration issues is a prime example – and the endless cycle of identifying there is a problem, testing it to find what’s wrong by pushing through data, trying to track down the owner and asking them to fix the data issue, testing the new data by pushing through all the data again. Then doing it all again the next time.  

Yet, that type of issue can be expedited simply and effectively by introducing error notifications, where you effectively cut out anyone who doesn’t need to touch the problem. Instead of passing through your IT team, the error notification can be directed to the person who created and owns the (usually) at-fault data. They can fix the data and push it through to test the integration. And suddenly, you have a win-win situation. While the IT team has a broken-fixed or broken-not-fixed overview of integration issues, they’re not distracted from their business-as-usual-and-more roles by trying to fix a problem they have no control over. And as the data owner has taken control of rectifying their own issue, it’s managed more quickly. So, productivity is improved, as is data issue resolution.

Better still, all the information relating to issues can be viewed on one screen and shared with everyone involved – from you to the IT team to the data owner – so there is genuine accountability. There is at-a-glance visibility of why a problem hasn’t been resolved, if it’s caused by missing data or if something else is impacting the integration, and how many hours or days it’s been languishing.

In your role as COO, you will be hyperaware of the impact of not knowing you have an integration problem.

We all know those businesses that have gone for months without being aware that they were missing data in their reporting, blind to its massive impact on their finances and decision-making. Suppose your integration platform doesn’t offer automated monitored error notifications and a single pane of glass reporting on outcomes. In that case, it can be easy to miss that processes are not working, or vital data is not sent. For example, incomplete sales or customer data may stop specific invoices from being sent out - or they may go out without the 3PL freight price on them.

Without day-to-day visibility of what’s working and what’s not, productivity and profitability are the first to suffer when good integrations (or, more frequently, data) turn bad.

3 reasons why playing safe can pay off.

It must be said that selecting a cloud-native integration platform from IT leaders such as Microsoft (Azure Integration Services), AWS (Application Integration of AWS), and Oracle (Oracle Data Integration Platform Cloud) comes with significant advantages.

Three, in fact.

1. Your integration platform’s technology is consistently updated
2. You can ensure a streamlined technology stack
3. You can leverage the best commercial solution by utilising a multi-cloud strategy

Let’s look at those three propositions in a little more depth.

1. The appeal of evergreen technology

From the perspective of a CTO, the advantage of going with a leading player is that no matter which one you choose, your cloud-native integration will be continually enhanced as part of their strategy. So, in effect, you don’t need to worry about which provider you choose. You can be confident that their solution won’t be retired or reach the end of its roadmap. That they will continue to onboard more and more connectors, and they are highly unlikely to be sold off (although stranger things have happened).

The big three providers provide cloud platforms and services to some of the world’s largest organisations, so you can be confident that what’s on offer works seamlessly. And if there’s any downtime, you can take comfort that their largest and most important clients – who contribute millions of dollars of annual revenue - are also weighing in with their concerns. And they are most definitely heard loud and clear, even if you worry your voice is lost in the crowd.

2. Streamlined solution stack

When you opt for one of the big three providers, you invest in streamlining your technology stack - everything works together seamlessly. So, if you have an existing Microsoft environment, choosing Azure as your integration layer may make sense. Or if you use JD Edwards or NetSuite as your ERP, then Oracle Cloud is perhaps an easy choice.

It must be noted, though, that competition is fierce. Having a vendor-dominant technology stack isn’t an automatic shoo-in for that vendor’s cloud integration platform just because it’s an ‘easy’ option.    

3. Mitigate costs with multi-cloud

With big providers comes big competition. And if you have a multi-cloud strategy to deliver flexibility, simplicity, and cost-savings, you are well placed to take advantage of some of the excellent commercial deals and low-code or click-to-configure features from Azure, AWS and Oracle.

It’s time to take a hands-off approach to bad data.

It just seems to happen naturally - as the IT Manager, you get lumbered with everything integration.

While it’s expected that your team will resolve all integration errors, our experience tells us that 95% of integration errors post-go-live are, in fact, data issues. And the problem with that is that while you may own the framework, you can’t fix bad data.

If you currently work with a legacy integration layer, it’s probably a familiar frustration. You receive error notifications, so you have to push the data back through to replicate the error and see what’s going on. Only to discover it’s nothing you can help with – the data is at fault, not the integration. So, you need to track down the data owner and ask them to fix the issue. And then, you need to push it through again to check that the error is resolved. While that sounds simple enough, it doesn’t take into account that the data set could have accumulated hundreds of thousands of new records over just a few months.

Lesson learned? When your business decides to invest in a new integration layer, make sure you (or your partner) build smarts into it from the outset. So, when there's an error notification, the issue gets pushed directly past the IT team and to the person who owns the troublesome data, so they can sort it out and even test it at their end. It will save time, effort and frustration.

For example, let’s say an accounts receivable team member sets up a new customer in your ERP but misses some non-optional data or puts in an impossible email with extra spaces. They’ll be directly notified of an error at their end and can open a dashboard filter by their integration point to view the data values. Once they’ve updated the original at-fault data entry, they hit ‘retry’, and the data is automatically pushed through again.

And as you and your team can view failures, resolutions, or ‘no action taken’ on a dashboard, you’ll be able to address continuing data errors by making changes to the source systems. You then have the integration information that really matters in front of you: Yes, it failed – but now it’s working. Issue resolved; what’s next?

From your perspective, it resolves those post-go-live integration issues faster. You’ll be in charge of making sure the source systems are fixed so bad data can't come through again, while the owners of the data can fix the failures. There’s no need for you to chase anyone; the data fix process is automated and reportable – and best of all, it was all hands-off.