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What Prevents Enterprise Companies from Integrating Software?

Posted on August 4, 2022 by - Enterprise Integration Solutions, IT

The reality of business today is that digital-first organizations have a significant advantage over their legacy infrastructure-dependent peers. The evolution of technology, the rise of globalization, and changes in how buyers expect to interact with sellers have bogged down businesses dependent on siloed data and systems.

But technology has a solution for this challenge. Enterprise integration allows companies with legacy, niche, or customized systems to connect data and processes with modern platforms to embrace digital transformation and remain competitive. And yet, the number of organizations who’ve fully implemented an integration strategy remains low.

6%

responded that they have a particular integration technology under consideration

30%

say time-to-market is one of their biggest objectives for digital transformations and cloud migrations

28%

say reducing overall operational costs is one of their biggest objectives for digital transformations and cloud migrations

*This blog post, originally published in August 2022, was updated above to reflect data from the 2023 State of Enterprise Integration Report published in April, 2023.

>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business. 

What is Holding Businesses Back from Software System Integration?

If enterprise integration is such a boon to businesses, why are so few adopting an enterprise integration strategy? How can we explain the glaring disparity between those who view integration positively and those who are implementing it – especially amid a growing push for digital transformation?

Tech professionals from developers to the C-suite point to a wide range of factors holding back the implementation of their enterprise integration strategies.

1. Platform Integration Budget Constraints

Budget is the most commonly cited roadblock to enterprise integration, with 36% of tech professionals saying cost concerns negatively impact enterprise integration plans. It’s not uncommon for integration projects to go over budget, and decision-makers are often forced to choose between competing priorities – many of which are more appealing to stakeholders.

2. Security Concerns During Integration Implementation

Changing how your company’s data or systems are accessed – or handing control of business critical information to an external party – can be daunting. Many enterprise integration platforms and services don’t provide enough transparency into how sensitive data is transported or protected to put IT professionals’ minds at ease. Nearly one-third (31%) say concerns about the security of their systems or data hinder the implementation of an enterprise integration strategy.

3. Lack of Integration Expertise

Attempting to implement an enterprise integration strategy without a team that has the required skills and expertise or know how to integrate software can result in a project that blows past deadlines or hampers other projects, negatively affecting budget. Engaging third-party professionals or consultants can help but comes with increased cost and/or security concerns.

42%

of IT professionals said their integrations had ineffective practices and other inefficiencies that impact the success of the business

98%

of IT professionals said they have rebuilt integrations for existing key business applications in the past 12 months

*This blog post, originally published in August 2022, was updated above to reflect data from the 2023 State of Enterprise Integration Report published in April, 2023.

4. Legacy Systems and Legacy Architecture

The last few years – particularly as businesses rushed to adapt to new models during the pandemic – have left many organizations dependent on patchwork fixes or custom built internal solutions that don’t lend themselves to a digital transformation. And when business critical data is trapped in siloed systems, many companies assume that cloud migration or integration are off the table. In fact, almost one-third of IT professionals say concerns that their legacy or custom systems can’t be integrated have kept them from moving forward with enterprise integration.

42%

of IT professionals say their top objective in the next year is to upgrade from legacy infrastructure

*This blog post, originally published in August 2022, was updated above to reflect data from the 2023 State of Enterprise Integration Report published in April, 2023.

iPaaS Removes Digital Integration Roadblocks

Is there a way to remove these roadblocks and close the gap between companies that acknowledge the importance of enterprise integration and those that have embraced an enterprise integration strategy?

Choosing an integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) solution can help address many concerns that keep companies from moving forward with integration. The “as-a-service” model of iPaaS solutions can help mitigate budget concerns by reducing upfront investments or costly long-term commitments and allows users to fully experience the benefits of integrated software. 

The right enterprise iPaaS provider will protect data in transit and at rest with solutions that facilitate comprehensive testing of all systems and integrations before going live. And an intuitive, visual solution can alleviate the need for your organization to dedicate all your top experts to the integration process, simplifying the development of integrations for legacy and custom-built applications.

The Current State of Enterprise Integration

The 2023 State of Enterprise Integration Report by Digibee offers unique, data-based insights into the latest trends in enterprise integration as well as a look at current best practices and changes to expect in the future.

Digibee empowers businesses to build flexible, scalable integration architecture that helps them compete and excel in today’s rapidly changing digital-first environment. Our cloud-native, low-code integration platform allows organizations to connect applications, processes, and people, for a faster time to market without hefty upfront commitments.

For more insights on current trends in enterprise integration, download your free copy of the report, and take your time to contact our experts directly with your questions.

3 Ways Your Organization Can Handle the IT Skills Shortage

Posted on July 26, 2022 by - IT

The IT skills shortage is reaching crisis levels as businesses embrace digital-first and omnichannel strategies to compete with digital natives. Many companies cite a shortage of skilled staff as their chief roadblock to digitization. But it doesn’t have to be.

Lack of Expertise Keeps Firms on Prem

Software developer is among the four most in-demand professions in the US in 2022, a position that is unlikely to change as companies increase cloud spending and embrace digital transformation strategies. And as demand for public cloud services skyrockets, tech giants like Amazon and Microsoft are dramatically expanding their workforces. This leaves  other companies struggling to staff key IT positions and, in some cases, putting digitization efforts on hold.

Did You Know? More than 70% of IT leaders around the globe say the IT skills shortage is an urgent concern. 

Cloud goals and strategies aren’t even safe at businesses with fully staffed IT departments. Your IT team faces a never-ending barrage of requests from team members with competing priorities, while also working to stay current on new technological innovations and complete routine maintenance tasks. It can be a thankless job.

As competition to attract and retain in-demand experts heats up, you shouldn’t assume that your skilled team won’t be lured away. But how can you ensure your company always has the expertise needed to support innovation and maintain your competitive edge, today and in the future?

>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business. 

Maintain Your Expertise While Hiring

The most obvious way to ensure your company isn’t hampered by the IT skills shortage is to keep hiring IT staff. The success of this strategy will depend heavily on your budget to do so, since you’ll be competing with nearly all of the corporate world to attract and retain employees with the skills and experience you need.

This tactic, despite its popularity, is not without its downsides:

  • It can be costly. You’ll need to be prepared to counter offers from massive corporations with deep pockets if you hope to win the most skilled staff.
  • Success rates vary. There’s no guarantee that you’ll succeed in securing the talent you need, and if you do,  other organizations may soon lure your experts away.
  • It’s disruptive. Onboarding new team members always involves some disruption – and repeated disruptions will negatively impact your innovation and modernization efforts.

Pro Tip: If you do opt for this strategy, put in the effort to make yourself an employer of choice. Take the time to understand your existing teams’ needs and support them with the tools they need to succeed. Build careers instead of simply filling vacancies.

Train Employees with Less Experience

Competing with corporate giants isn’t easy, so you might feel like your company will be better served getting out of the bidding war and instead focusing your efforts on training less experienced employees to protect against the IT skills shortage.

While this strategy avoids shelling out large amounts to cover the salaries of one or two expert players, it also comes with caveats.

  • It’s still not inexpensive. Instead of paying top dollar for the expertise you need, you’ll have to invest time and money into training to ensure your team has the required skills.
  • Results don’t always last. Once you get your staff to an expert level, you’re back to the previous issue: they’re in demand and you’ll have to fight to retain them.
  • Training takes time. Developing expertise doesn’t happen overnight, and all the time spent on training is time your competitors are gaining an advantage.

Pro Tip: This tactic works best if you tap into existing potential on your team. Try to be a bit more flexible about employment and educational experience. Encourage cross-training and offer opportunities to employees that show promise.

Uptrain Employees for Day-to-Day Efficiencies

Eliminating your dependence on experts for daily operations may seem like an unlikely way to address the global IT skills shortage, but it can be the most effective. Investing in technological solutions that reduce reliance on specific team members can  eliminate many of the challenges associated with hiring or training staff and offer some unique benefits.

  • Disruptions are minimized. The risk of operational disruptions drops significantly when processes don’t hinge on a small group of people with unique knowledge.
  • Scaling up is effortless. Technological investments can allow operations to grow and shift without significantly changing the demand on expert staff.
  • Your IT team benefits. This tactic lets senior specialists focus on challenging innovation tasks they enjoy most and junior workers execute less complicated assignments while still collaborating with experts to learn and grow.
  • It’s future-proof. Even the most highly skilled, loyal team members will eventually retire. Reducing dependency on experts means you can leverage their expertise for innovation now and you won’t be stranded when they leave.

Pro Tip: A cloud-based “as-a-service” solution allows you to invest in technology that reduces your exposure to the IT skills shortage without a huge upfront investment or long-term commitment.

Integration Drives Innovation

The benefits of integration are extensive and innovative. The modern integration architecture of an enterprise-integration-as-a-service solution helps your organization expedite digital transformation and cloud migration projects with a more responsive, agile environment. Data from different systems is integrated into a single, unified view of the business, further accelerating the pace of innovation. 

The benefits of pivoting to an iPaas for enterprise instead of focusing on hiring and retention include:

  • It’s simple. Low-code integration models streamline workflows so junior developers can handle routine tasks, freeing experts to focus on more high-value projects.
  • It’s seamless. An iPaaS solution that is data- and system-agnostic facilitates uninterrupted integrations between legacy systems and modern applications to support a digital-first strategy.
  • It’s scalable. The cloud-native architecture of an enterprise integration platform (iPaaS) allows for nearly unlimited scalability and flexibility and simultaneously reduces support and maintenance requirements.

Digibee Helps Solve the Talent Shortfall

Digibee’s iPaaS solution helps bridge the gap between existing integrating systems and new technologies, connecting data and platforms regardless of the amount of integration experts on staff. With Digibee, you can optimize productivity across your entire IT team, reducing your dependence on one or two experts and guarding against the effects of a global IT skills shortage.

To learn more about our accelerating integration and how to determine what stage your business is at, request a demo with our team today.

 

6 Cloud Migration Challenges to Avoid

Posted on July 25, 2022 by - Cloud Migration, IT

The transition from on-premises to cloud environments can provide your business with an array of technological advantages, not the least of which is enterprise architecture modernization. But cloud migration challenges are real – and in some cases, quite daunting – and must be considered as you plan your transition.

The best offense is a good defense. If you understand the cloud migration challenges you can expect to face, you can take steps to prepare for them, minimizing disruption and ensuring a smooth transition. In this post, we’ll examine some of the most common challenges associated with cloud migration and provide some guidelines for minimizing their impact.

>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business. 

1. Cloud Performance

Cloud environment performance is key to maintaining continuity and minimizing disruptions that can have significant adverse effects. Cloud performance issues are typically related to availability, network latency, or application processing delays.

How to Do it Right

Before your migration process begins, it’s essential to:

  • Identify which applications are best suited to cloud migration
  • Understand application dependencies
  • Make a plan for what you will migrate and when
  • Become familiar with cloud integration platforms as they will allow for ideal performance

Make migration decisions based on data flows or business domains – not on which systems provide or receive data. Select technology that delivers the flexibility to migrate what needs migrating and keep other systems in place.

Decoupling data streams in completely isolated containers allows for both vertical and horizontal tuning. This model lets you optimize traffic between points, removing the performance constraints typically associated with cloud migration and putting the focus of analysis on endpoint capacity.

2. Cost Management

Many organizations are facing rapidly climbing cloud costs and cloud waste. It’s vital to carefully manage costs and factor in the duration and complexity of your transition to minimize cloud migration challenges and ensure a solid return on your investment.

How to Do it Right

There are a few ways to control the price of a shift to the cloud:

  • Establish a cost management checklist to follow whenever you deploy new services
  • Base all organizational cloud usage on your company’s financial policies
  • Budget specific amounts for different projects, departments, or categories
  • Utilize cost reporting tools from vendors or third parties to ensure consistency

A platform-as-a-service model eliminates the need for upfront infrastructure investments and allows costs to be adjusted to match project scope without compromising the agility or scalability of your solution. 

And while traditional cloud vendor tools focus solely on the transition, a cloud based integration system including an enterprise integration platform-as-a-service can simplify your cloud migration process while also laying the groundwork for architecture modernization.

3. Cloud Governance

Control over provisioning, infrastructure delivery, and operations is a major challenge associated with cloud computing because of the complexity involved in properly implementing, using, controlling, and maintaining IT assets. Traditional governance models must be adapted to new environments to enhance security, manage risk, and avoid problems like:

  • Poor integration between cloud systems
  • Data or effort duplication
  • Lack of alignment between systems and business goals
  • Inefficient use of resources

How to Do it Right

  • Ensure reuse and access standardization to systems, data, and business flows
  • Keep cloud usage standards consistent with organizational and industry regulations and compliance requirements
  • Align cloud strategy with overall business and IT strategies to ensure cloud systems provide quantifiable support for business objectives
  • Maintain clear agreements between all stakeholders so resources are used and shared appropriately
  • Implement changes in a consistent, standardized manner
  • Rely on monitoring and automation for dynamic response to events

4. Operations Management

The problem of shadow IT and unnecessary use of resources can reduce operational efficiency and security while driving up costs. Robust cloud operations management is needed to help overcome some cloud migration challenges.

Service level agreements define expected performance levels, but continual monitoring is necessary to ensure SLAs are upheld as infrastructure components change. Processes and checks must be implemented before code is deployed to production, and security requirements and access controls put in place.

How to Do it Right

Choose a cloud migration partner or solution that can provide the tools you need to manage operations, including:

  • Active monitoring with execution control, error handling, and reprocessing rules
  • Easy-to-use dashboard
  • Logging and alert capabilities
  • API management support for the creation, security, management, and sharing of APIs
  • Ability to interact with existing ITSM tools to send logs, events, and metrics to central monitoring, email addresses, or messaging applications

5. Observability

Observability enables administrators to gather internal and external data on networked resources to monitor and understand their behavior, investigate anomalies, and improve performance and uptime. But this can be challenging in a cloud environment, given the massive volume of data and components in cloud architecture.

How to Do it Right

Make sure the observability tools you select provide the following:

  • Integration with existing tools and support for necessary frameworks and languages
  • User-friendly interface to ensure they are used correctly and regularly
  • Real-time insights through dashboards, reports, and queries to ensure teams can quickly understand issues and their impacts
  • Support for modern event handling and context techniques
  • Visual presentation for rapid comprehension and action

6. Cloud Security

As with governance, the controls and practices developed to secure on-premises environments can’t always meet the requirements of cloud-based systems – and relying on legacy security systems can introduce new risks to your operations due to:

  • Increased attack surface (public cloud has become a large, attractive target for cybercriminals) 
  • Insecure interfaces and APIs
  • Lack of visibility and tracking, which can lead to reduced protections
  • Workload flexibility – traditional tools can’t handle dynamic environments
  • DevOps, DevSecOps, and automation (appropriate controls must be identified early in the development cycle to avoid security gaps or delays)
  • Granular permissions and keys management, which can give the wrong users dangerously high access levels
  • Complex environments made up of public cloud, private cloud, on-premises deployments, and edge protection

How to Do it Right

Mission-critical resources should be deployed in logically isolated areas, and dedicated WAN links and enterprise-defined static routing configurations used to customize access to devices, networks, gateways, and public IP addresses.

Secure all distributed cloud applications and automatically update WAF rules when there is a measurable change in traffic. Be sure to apply and enforce all security policies and processes consistently.

Employ encryption at every level of data transport, and deploy software that can detect, identify, and remediate threats in real-time.

Avoid Cloud Migration Challenges with Digibee

Digibee’s unique cloud native iPaaS for enterprise model helps minimize the risk that these common cloud migration challenges will disrupt migration and architecture modernization processes, ensuring that your digital transformation is smooth and seamless. Our solution isn’t just about moving your data and processes to the cloud. We help future-proof your operations so you’re ready for anything – including competing in a digital-first world.

Learn more about how you can overcome cloud migration challenges with Digibee’s iPaaS solution – Request a demo with our team.

How Digibee Helps Solve the Enterprise Integration Problem

Posted on July 20, 2022 by - Enterprise Integration Solutions

We’re all a part of the digital revolution. We download podcasts and stream music on Spotify, hail rides with Uber, and get purchases delivered directly to our doorsteps with Amazon.

These digital leaders have not only redefined the way consumers relate to businesses, but they have also defined new markets — toppling traditional ones in the process. They’ve identified consumers’ desire to solve problems on their own, immediately, using digital channels like chatbots and connected devices — market dynamics that have left traditional retailers struggling to survive and keep pace with digital winners.

A McKinsey and Co. survey indicates that responses to the pandemic accelerated the adoption of digital technologies by several years — and that many of these changes are likely here to stay.

And where traditional organizations are heavily invested in siloed information systems on legacy architecture that prevent them from easily developing disruptive solutions to compete in the digital world, digital companies are born using modern technology platforms and carry little to no technical debt.

>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business. 

Facing the Integration Predicament

So how can traditional corporations compete with digital giants and venture capital-backed startups that have the advantage of lower costs and disruptive models?

The most effective approach to the digital transformation required to remain competitive is software systems integration.  Replacing legacy systems can involve downtime risks that many companies are unprepared to take, but updating them with new architecture creates an environment where the delivery of digital services is simple and cost effective.

The integration process can be a marathon that requires time, money, and often, specialized resources. Whether you’re working with systems developed ten to twenty years ago or even relatively new API or Web Services solutions, you’ll likely need the expertise and skills of a specialist to connect your world.

As of 2020, there were just over 100,000 systems integration professionals employed in the US, and the majority only stay at a job for under two years.

Traditionally, integration has been a complex, costly, difficult to maintain undertaking. Not only was it not guaranteed to solve the problem, but it could become a problem itself (and often one more serious than the original issue).

Cracking the Code to Digital Integration

The traditional approach to software systems integration relies on costly, time-consuming coding. But coding integrations aren’t the only way to connect legacy systems. Digibee offers low code integration consisting of a visual, drag-and-drop interface that simplifies the integration creation process. 

Traditional

Integrations are custom-built by developers to connect systems based on business roles.

  • Requires significant skill
  • Each line of code must be debugged, compiled, and tested to ensure quality and security
  • Deployment, execution, monitoring, maintenance, and updates are complex and resource-intensive
  • Unique integrations are dependent on developer knowledge and can be challenging to maintain or update

Digibee

Automated pipelines transform and communicate data across systems for simple integration.

  • No coding knowledge or specialized expertise needed
  • Integrations are automated and executed on a single platform
  • Deployments are fast, organized, efficient, and scalable
  • SaaS-based business model lets users test assumptions without significant investment

The Digibee integration platform structures automations within the three lifecycle domains: Build, Run, and Monitor. Learn more.

But let’s dig deeper into why this model is the best approach to digital integration.

A More Efficient Approach

Digibee provides a simpler, faster way to integrate systems. Users simply drag and drop elements on a basic canvas, creating integrations an average of 10 times faster than other approaches or tools.

The Digibee platform includes specialized connectors for a diverse range of systems, business functions, data, and entities — all graphically represented for easy comprehension without the need for specialized programming skills — and ready for hundreds of different technologies and well-known applications, such as SAP, Totvs, Oracle, SalesForce, ServiceNow, and hundreds of others. 

The integration platform offers data transformation components (also graphically represented) to facilitate the creation of complex data connection, transformation, and enrichment rules. These components are continually enhanced and automatically updated.

Digibee also has specialized development teams organized in tracks to create new connectors for diverse needs with specific systems and technologies. These tracks build a new connector to platform standards — with many created in just hours.

Digibee’s visual integration environment offers self-documentation capabilities not available with traditional coding solutions. The pipeline flow representation provides an easy-to-understand image of each connection’s function. This enables the creation of proprietary libraries with connections to online services like maps, social networks, or public cloud systems and facilitates digital connections between internal business functions and customers, suppliers, or partners.

Increased Availability

Traditional

Traditional solutions rely on execution code centralized in one environment, presenting a single point of failure and exposing companies to performance loss and the high costs of infrastructure and maintenance.

The creation of high-availability environments means doubling (or even tripling) investments in hardware and software infrastructure, which increases maintenance and upgrade requirements.

Digibee

Each pipeline is completely isolated in containers (dockers) in a Kubernetes infrastructure optimized specifically for the proposed integration. 

Failure of one pipeline doesn’t affect the execution of another, and in the event of a pipeline failure, a new instance is started in under a second — drastically reducing downtime and other issues.

Integrations continue to work even if the Digibee management platform becomes unavailable.

Other features of Digibee pipelines include:

Scalability

  • Limited only by cloud provider availability and infrastructure
  • Dynamic and able to grow automatically at any time, based on demand

High Volume

  • Pipelines can scale to support 10+ concurrent transactions, with increased flow:
  • Vertically, by extending the pipeline to support a larger volume of concurrent transactions
  • Horizontally, by creating new pipeline instances

Resilience

  • High availability or disaster recovery configuration by initiating a second pipeline in parallel to another cloud region or infrastructure
  • Runtime includes resilience functions like circuit breaker (queuing requests when endpoints struggle under high volume)

Unparalleled Data Security

The average number of attacks per company climbed 31% from 206 in 2020 to 270 in 2021, and the cost of cybercrime is expected to hit $10.5 trillion by 2025.

Data security is a continually increasing enterprise concern. Digibee offers unparalleled security to minimize the chance that data will be compromised. Pipelines are isolated in containers accessible only by customers, and sensitive data flows inside containers are encrypted using our proprietary algorithm, or customers’ own encryption service.

Digibee handles all service authentication using an API Gateway at no additional cost, offering a variety of options, including basic authentication, key authentication, OAuth 2.0, and OpenID. The API Gateway also offers a range of other functions, including:

  • Monitoring and logging
  • Access control list (ACL)
  • Caching
  • Rate limiting
  • Serverless functionality
  • Low latency

All these features facilitate high availability, security, and resilience, customized to meet the needs of mission-critical environments in any industry. The entire Digibee platform is built on state of the art architecture and proven systems engineering, created to offer the resilience needed to modernize legacy systems and guarantee performance.

Comprehensive Monitoring

The Digibee platform is designed for easy operation and troubleshooting. Using Big Data and analytics, the solution can track and monitor 100% of processed transactions.

  • Pipelines in the Digibee platform are continually monitored for health and transaction consistency, identifying the hop-to-hop steps of an integration — including the duration of each step, especially endpoints. 
  • All logs are captured and maintained independently of the pipeline to eliminate performance burdens. Logs are stored in an Elasticsearch cluster and are accessed through the platform or with third-party analytics tools.
  • Company integrations are easily organized and structured for effective documentation and maintenance versus traditional solutions, where integrations don’t follow any set pattern or methodology — resulting in chaotic environments that are challenging to maintain.
  • Pipelines in the Digibee platform are organized and categorized in a dashboard with the description and status of each integration, isolating the integration process of involved endpoints into a single operating environment.
  • The platform implements DevOps, managing development, testing, and production environments, and includes a fully automated pipeline deployment and publication process.
  • Digibee moves any data to and from any platform and public cloud. It is built with a Google Cloud Services foundation for unparalleled speed, scalability, and security. 
    What Makes Digibee Different?

What Makes Digibee Different?

Digibee technology is designed to offer ease of use on a DIY concept, but at the same time, take on the full responsibility of our customers’ integrations.

Minimal Commitments

  • Business model based on per pipeline usage
  • No annual contracts
  • No need for major upfront investments in technology, services, or training
  • Pipeline value includes the platform, hosting, traffic, operation, and monitoring (governed by an SLA)

Friction-free Engagement

Digibee’s business model minimizes risk and offers full transparency into costs, making it easy and painless for customers to:

  • Try new ideas
  • Test services
  • Deploy temporary projects
  • Modernize architecture

The Digibee platform is licensed by the monthly consumption of pipelines — cross-system integration flows with platform-defined data transformation and enrichment logic operating in the Digibee cloud.

Each pipeline supports up to 10 concurrent transactions and can scale up to 64MB of memory in the Digibee cloud. If any pipeline needs to process more than 10 concurrent transactions or consume more than 64MB of memory, a new license is required for each range.

Examples:

If a single pipeline scales to support 80 concurrent transactions, it requires 8 platform licenses.

If a single pipeline consumes 128MB of memory, it requires 2 platform licenses.

Number of Concurrent Transactions

10

40

80

Memory Allocated to Pipeline

64 MB

256 MB

512 MB

Number of Licenses Required

1

4

8

What to Expect with Digibee

Digibee licenses pipelines in packs of 10, 100 or 1000 units. Our platform licensing includes all these modules and services:

  • Integration and operation portal access for up to 50 users
  • Public cloud pipeline hosting
  • Expert technical support during business hours (M-F)
  • Regular platform improvements and additional features
  • Use of all platform components, including API Gateway
  • 24/7 platform operation and monitoring
  • Availability SLA
  • Access to operation and monitoring dashboards

And although Digibee’s primary service offering is the SaaS model in the Digibee cloud, we also offer a range of customer programs.

SaaS in a dedicated Digibee cloud environment

SaaS in your cloud environment

On-premises licensing

An Elegant Solution to Integration Challenges

Digital transformation comes with integration and technology modernization challenges that can present hurdles for companies of any size.

With Digibee’s enterprise integration platform as a service (iPaas), legacy systems trapped in old, expensive models gain the momentum and agility required to meet today’s business demands. New micro-services and API-based systems deliver the orchestration, performance, and resiliency that have become standard among digital winners.

The Digibee approach solves the problems associated with systems integration in an elegant, modern, and frictionless way. We resolve end-to-end integration challenges using proprietary technology to create, execute, and operate integrations while bringing order to environments that are chaotic and unstable.

Digibee integrates systems faster than traditional solutions and at a fraction of the cost, allowing your development team to focus on innovation, not problem-solving.

Learn more

Book a demo with our team to learn more about our innovative integration solutions.

8 Benefits of System Integration for Business

Posted on June 20, 2022 by - Enterprise Integration Solutions, IT

Organizations of all sizes are starting to recognize the challenges of working across multiple systems simultaneously. Improvements to data integration platforms can help streamline processes, reduce costs, simplify employee workload, and drive company growth and performance.

System integration—the process of strategically connecting applications and data to enable process automation, real-time analytics, and enterprise-wide orchestration—gets more complex as enterprises scale. Enterprise system integration is all about ensuring legacy, on-prem, and cloud applications operate in unison to streamline business processes.

A single enterprise integration platform, or iPaaS, can do so, unlocking the following benefits: 

  • Streamlined and automated business processes
  • Cost savings and operational efficiencies
  • Full utilization of technology investments
  • Flexibility to experiment and innovate
  • Increase security and governance
  • Real-time customer feedback
  • Faster growth and product development
  • Efficient remote workflows

The global integration system market is set to grow by 11.7% by 2025. Let’s dive deeper into the  importance of enterprise system integration and how to adopt the best technology.

>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business. 

What is system integration?

System integration generally refers to connecting a variety of applications and components into a single system that supports the kind functions that drive modern business.

This can be as simple as connecting two cloud-based tools using their APIs, or as complex as managing hundreds of integrations among legacy systems, on-premise and cloud data warehouses, custom applications, and microservices on enterprise integration architecture.

Enterprise system integration happens on an integration platform (or iPaaS) that developers use to centrally manage multiple integration architectures and configurations, preferably with low-code building and managed, cloud-native infrastructure that scales automatically to meet capacity needs. 

Without an iPaaS to manage enterprise integrations, it’s easy to find yourself up against some serious challenges.

The biggest roadblocks to enterprise system integration

Many companies are just managing to keep up with the requirements of managing integrations, whether on a home-grown solution that requires extensive maintenance, or on a legacy iPaaS that doesn’t meet modern standards for cloud-based, real-time data streaming and orchestration. 

To get from constantly playing catchup to reclaiming time for innovation, you’ll need to overcome these common obstacles to managing system integrations at scale:

  • Relying solely on developers who specialize in integrations. When integrations are hard-coded or overly intricate, it takes specialty engineering resources to manage them. This sends hiring and outsourcing costs soaring.
  • Not having a centralized platform to manage enterprise-wide integrations. The more siloed different integrations are, the harder it is to achieve real orchestration.
  • Not being able to efficiently access crucial data, either from on-prem systems or legacy software that can’t handle real-time data flows.
  • No secure way to connect data to external partner systems, like suppliers, clients, and auditors.
  • Lack of time to deal with these problems. Too many digital transformation initiatives feel overwhelming or take the back burner to other customer-facing product improvements. However, integrations drive product excellency—deprioritizing integrations will eventually hinder your product’s success anyway.  

8 benefits of investing in an enterprise integration strategy

The benefits to enterprise system integration are almost becoming table stakes. Customers expect fast, performant products that operate on an interconnected set of applications and services. Internally, top talent expects to access data from multiple systems and use it to build the best possible product, customer experience, and operational workflows. 

To stay competitive, companies must fully capitalize on these benefits—the more fine-tuned their systems, the better their margins and growth metrics. Here’s how to do it on a modern integration platform:

1. Full utilization of legacy systems

Instead of replacing or refactoring older ERPs, databases, custom software, or other legacy solutions, enterprise IT teams can protect their initial investment and extend their capabilities with newer, cloud-based tools.

By building a single integration to an iPaaS that sits between modern services and legacy systems, data can flow securely from old to new without overloading compute resources or requiring extensive maintenance.

A common example of this newfound agility is modernizing the procure-to-pay process. A company would use a built-in SAP integration to connect ERP data to their iPaaS, allowing the data to flow freely through cloud accounting tools, supplier systems, and a BI solution without straining the original server. As soon as a purchase order is created in SAP, a slew of automations are triggered to speed up approvals, invoice matching and payment, and updates to metrics in AP dashboards.

Enterprises primarily looking to modernize legacy systems should explore cloud integration, or the act of bringing legacy applications and databases into a hybrid or multi-cloud environment. 

2. Streamlined, automated processes

With legacy and cloud solutions connected on the same integration platform, your options for process automation greatly expand. Each department or go-to-market team can prioritize automations that help them better serve customers, iterate on products, or improve margins.

A strong use case for automation lies in the customer journey, where an intricate web of website activity, in-product behavior, email communication, support workflows, and dozens of other interaction types paint the full picture of how well you’re acquiring and retaining customers. 

With your website, products, marketing automation platform, CRM, helpdesk solution, and more connected on a single integration platform, you can build automations that ensure customers don’t fall through the cracks. 

Many companies even create fully automated self-serve channels where smaller customers can try, buy, troubleshoot, and upgrade to higher pricing tiers of a SaaS product without ever interacting with sales or a live support agent. This frees up resources for enterprise sales without losing other potential revenue streams.

3.  Lower labor costs and TCO

Maintaining an enterprise technology stack means procuring and installing many platforms and components, managing complicated billing situations for hundreds of vendors, and often hiring specialized developers to build and maintain integrations across them all. 

And if your company isn’t paying an internal team of experts to maintain your disparate systems, you may find yourself outsourcing—this can drive up costs rapidly, depending on the number and complexity of your systems.

Today’s most cost-effective integration platforms solve this problem with low-code integration tools and centralized, managed infrastructure. Instead of requiring integration specialists or extensive training, these platforms allow general or junior developers to build integrations at scale by dragging and dropping reusable components in a visual interface. 

An effective integration solution can eliminate your reliance on the costly subscriptions, updates, and licensing fees that come with multiple systems. Additionally, internal developers don’t have to manage integration infrastructure, instead relying on their integration platform vendor to provide autoscaling, containerized services that support massive enterprise integration projects.

4. Innovative new use cases for your data

Once you’re able to access structured and unstructured data from different systems in real-time, true innovation begins. Your integration platform should enable any number of integration architectures, from enterprise service bus (ESB) to hub-and-spoke, connecting on-prem databases, cloud data lakes and warehouses, and third party data sources and applications that help you understand your business better.  

With a single, central ecosystem and a 360° view of all your data, business leaders can explore and benchmark against metrics relevant to their departments using BI tools that don’t require coding or analyst experience. Data scientists and analysts spend their time fine-tuning sophisticated data models, experimenting with AI, and building data-enabled products for customers and internal stakeholders. 

Because data all runs through a centralized integration platform, it only takes a single update to roll out improvements enterprise-wide.

5. Improved data security and governance

When sensitive data gets out into the world, your business can face significant financial consequences—as well as a loss of trust among your customers. Using a modern iPaaS for system integration means you’re always operating on a secure, enterprise-grade platform that protects sensitive, business-critical data. 

Your iPaaS should allow you to quickly toggle security controls on and off across all of your integrations. For example, IT might enable single sign on (SSO) across hundreds of enterprise applications in just a few minutes by using prebuilt connectors and components on their integration platform.

In industries with an intense regulatory environment, companies can use integration platforms to stay on top of compliance requirements. An enterprise-grade solution includes detailed logging, built-in governance, and scalable workflows for changing business logic to keep up with evolving laws. 

6. Real-time customer feedback loops

Customers may not always tell you how they feel about your product, but their actions do. Companies with fully integrated systems can access real-time event data from their website and product, combine it with customer data from Salesforce and other sales and marketing tools, then use it to better tailor support and product improvements to their ideal customer. 

This is especially powerful for product-led or community-led strategies that rely on early adopters, power users, and the developer community to guide the product roadmap. However, even the most traditional enterprise sales team benefits from real-time feedback during trials, pilots, and onboarding to increase ACV and expansion revenue down the road.  

7. Accelerated growth and time to market

With time-consuming processes automated, manual data entry eliminated, and real-time analytics accessible from anywhere, your organization can reach important milestones faster.

Product teams are able to launch powerful, customer-facing apps that rely on accurate data from a multitude of sources. Sales and marketing teams can use automation to target your most valuable customer segments and bring in higher-ACV deals.

Having a scalable integration strategy frees up IT resources to streamline business processes and accelerate common workflows instead of spending time managing integration infrastructure. The more sophisticated your company’s automation capabilities, the faster you can eliminate bottlenecks and bring exciting new systems to market.

8. Work-from-home for the future

The pandemic exposed enterprise integration weaknesses like nothing had before. As the workforce went remote overnight, many large enterprises found it hard to work around company firewalls and IT guardrails.  

On an enterprise integration platform, your business has a central source of truth that both employees and automated systems can access securely from anywhere. On-prem systems stay protected, business stakeholders and partners make decisions on real-time data in the cloud, and customers enjoy a seamless experience that’s completely location-independent.

Enterprise system integration on Digibee

Digibee is the only integration platform that scales integration workflows while reducing cost, technical debt, and the burden on development teams. Enterprises use it to manage multiple integration models, quickly building, testing, deploying, and monitoring every integration from one flexible platform. 

With Digibee, you don’t have to start from scratch to realize the key benefits of system integration. Developers can use Capsules, or modular components to quickly build new integrations and manage them without specialized training. The platform’s flexibility allows even the most daunting integration projects to move faster—you can modernize legacy systems, adopt new tools without abandoning old ones, and migrate away from outdated software solutions at your own pace without impacting the business. 

To learn more, take our product tour or request a personalized demo from our sales team.

What Makes an iPaaS the Right Choice for Enterprise Businesses?

Posted on May 4, 2022 by - Enterprise Integration Solutions

Solutions offered “as-a-service” are hardly new. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) are all commonplace technologies we take for granted. But new “aaS” categories continue to emerge – some of which are already widely adopted in the enterprise world.

Integration Platform-as-a-Service (or iPaaS) for enterprises offers companies new opportunities to transform the way they manage IT resources. Building on some concepts at the core of SaaS and PaaS, it offers new strategies for connecting siloed or legacy IT assets (and the business units that depend on them).

>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business. 

What are the Benefits of iPaaS for Enterprise?

The short explanation: iPaaS is a technological solution that uses cloud-based resources to bring disparate IT resources and systems together and utilize all the benefits of integration in one place.

What does that mean? iPaaS is a way to integrate data and systems that lack a native means for efficiently connecting with each other to build unified workflows. It lets organizations define how independent systems should communicate, share data, and operate in tandem. iPaaS can also provide tools to help secure and monitor the integrated environments they empower businesses to build.

By design, an iPaaS is platform-agnostic and capable of creating connections between virtually any applications or resources, regardless of whether they are running in the same cloud, separate clouds, on-premises or some combination of the above. It can work with anything from cloud-native, API-first applications to monolithic legacy systems.

Enterprise iPaaS vs. SaaS vs. PaaS?
An enterprise iPaaS can fill a role that these others do not. While a PaaS provides a simple solution for application development and deployment, and a SaaS lets users host software in the cloud without the need to deploy or manage it themselves, neither addresses the need to integrate multiple applications. That’s where enterprise iPaaS comes in. An enterprise iPaaS solution ensures secure, reliable connections between IT systems, allowing companies to leverage the power of all their applications collectively.

What to Expect from an iPaaS

An iPaaS is a category of technology, not a specific product, and there are multiple ways to implement an iPaaS. Nonetheless, every iPaaS should offer a core set of features:

Connect Siloed Systems

Allows disparate applications or resources to communicate and share data in a systematic way

Align IT and Business Goals

Allows IT teams to collaborate with other stakeholders to identify and implement valuable integrations and maximize ROI

Facilitate System Monitoring & Management

Enables teams to monitor integration performance in near-real time, track updates

Connect Disparate Units

Facilitates cooperation between discrete business units by connecting systems and data

Accelerate Deployment & Updates

Simplifies and reduces time spent on deployment and update processes

Support Continual Improvement

Allows teams to optimize applications over time through point-to-point observability and automated remediation

How Can an iPaaS Benefit Enterprises?

The features discussed in the previous section may help clarify what constitutes an iPaaS, but connecting those features to real-world business goals is the best way to demonstrate how an iPaaS offers value to an organization.

1. Enabling Composable Applications

There is frequently a disconnect between the way businesses develop and deploy applications and the way they use them. 

Traditionally, apps have been developed on a case-by-case basis – each created to serve a specific business need. This strategy has resulted in significant functionality overlap between applications, leading to a great deal of redundant effort. 

Example:
A company with dozens of apps that each include a payment processing component might be spending time and money to create and maintain that functionality in each app from scratch.

But in a composable architecture, functionality is split into discrete units that are shared across applications. So when developers create a module to handle payment processing, that module can be used in every application requiring that functionality, decreasing the resources needed for both development and maintenance.

Composable applications offer a wide range of benefits over traditional design and development strategies:

  • Agility: Functionality updates can be completed more rapidly when changes made to a single module are reflected across multiple apps
  • Performance: Eliminating the need for developers to write the same code multiple times means companies can do more, faster with a smaller number of specialized experts 
  • Customizability: Composable app modules can be customized to meet the needs of different users or support nuanced use cases within each application
  • Data integration: A composable app strategy enables a single stream of data to be created and shared across multiple apps, eliminating the need for redundant data stores

Why iPaaS for Enterprise Matters

One of the reasons composable applications aren’t used everywhere is because integrating and managing so many different units of code is such a steep challenge. For composable apps to work, developers need the ability to:

  • Connect all the modules needed to complete applications
  • Update individual modules without breaking the app functionality that depends on them
  • Configure module behaviors for different use cases and data types 

With an iPaaS solution in place, developers have all the capabilities needed to connect, manage, secure, and update modules in a consistent, systematic way without compromising on functionality.

2. Supporting Omnichannel Architecture

Businesses today typically need to deliver a consistent user experience across a range of different platforms including PCs, tablets, smartphones, and Internet of Things devices. Omnichannel is the new normal. Consumers expect to be able to reliably, intuitively interact with your business regardless of how they engage with your systems.

But organizations with established IT environments that weren’t designed with omnichannel initiatives in mind can face steep challenges. Delivering a consistent experience for users via applications that are each reliant on their own code and data stream (and in some cases, data structures) is not easy. Guaranteeing that experience will also be fast and reliable is even harder.

And to make things even more complicated, many business applications are in a continual state of evolution. Building manual integrations to deliver a consistent end-user experience becomes a never-ending game of cat and mouse, as an update in one application prompts a domino effect of update requirements across other apps to maintain the omnichannel experience.

Why iPaaS for Enterprise Matters

An iPaaS solution can help eliminate many of the application-level barriers to an omnichannel strategy. Teams can define integrations between applications once, then keep them in sync even as the apps themselves evolve. And the composable nature of iPaaS integrations makes reusing components across applications a simple process, ensuring users have the same functionality and data access across all apps.

3. Maximizing Business Agility

An agile business is a competitive business. Companies with the ability to react rapidly to changes in the market or their customer base have a better chance of success.

Unfortunately, IT systems are often one of the weakest links in the business agility chain. Reliance on siloed applications means that companies must update every app individually – a time-consuming prospect – to deploy new functionality. At the same time, a siloed organizational structure makes it difficult for various business units to understand what others are doing and identify efficiency and cost-saving opportunities.

Complex enterprise software systems can make business agility even harder to achieve. When special expertise is required to manage and connect each business-critical platform with others, it can be challenging to update IT systems to support business strategy pivots.

Why iPaaS for Enterprise Matters

With iPaaS, business platforms like enterprise resource planning or point of sale systems can be integrated in weeks rather than months or years – a significant advantage when goals shift suddenly or companies make internal organizational changes. The ability to execute business functions in parallel within an iPaaS platform also facilitates rapid data transfers, ensuring that IT systems are supporting, not hindering, operations. 

And because an iPaaS serves as a central platform on which applications can be built, run, and monitored, it empowers stakeholders, developers, and IT teams to collaborate in a common space when defining and implementing changes required to meet changing demands and new goals.

Could Your Enterprise Benefit from an iPaaS?

The power and benefits of an iPaaS solution could help your organization achieve its business goals, regardless of company size or vertical. At Digibee, we offer an innovative iPaaS model that can help your business address systems integration challenges faster and more efficiently than any other solution on the market today, creating integrations up to ten times faster than other tools with our automated, system-agnostic pipelines.

Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business.