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Everything is connected. The past three years have only served to demonstrate just how accurate that statement is. The changes businesses rushed to implement amid pandemic restrictions did not evaporate as life returned to normal, and the effects of crises here at home and around the world serve as a continual reminder of just how connected we all are.

Digital transformation has emerged as a top priority as businesses work to meet changing consumer demands and ensure they won’t be caught off-guard by whatever comes next. But to achieve digital transformation, organizations must choose between a dizzying number of data integration techniques and strategies to connect their legacy systems with the solutions they rely on for growth and innovation.

This post examines some of the most common data integration techniques and strategies, their pros and cons, and how they perform in different use cases. 

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

Benefits of Data Integration

Does your organization really need data integration? The answer depends, of course, on your business model, but is probably yes.And even if you don’t strictly need integration, your organization could probably benefit from it. Here are just a few benefits of integrating your data:

• Reduced costs – Many forms of data integration automate the transfer of data between systems, meaning you dedicate less resources to moving data manually.
• Improved efficiency – Automated integration also eases your IT staff’s workload and reduces the risk of errors.
• Enhanced data integrity – Data integration solutions generally have a built-in validation step, so you can make decisions based on your data with confidence that it’s accurate.
• Ability to innovate – Integration lets you connect business-critical legacy systems with modern solutions for the power to leverage trends and respond to changing demands.
• Increased security – Streamlining permissions and data access becomes simple and straightforward with integration.

5 Common Types of Data Integration

There are five key data integration strategies:

1. Manual Data Integration

As the name suggests, manual data integration relies on custom code to clean and connect data from different sources. This data integration technique is labor-intensive. Every single integration-related task, from converting to the correct format to displaying in the appropriate system, is done manually by a skilled developer.

Manual data integration works for one-off projects at companies not struggling with a shortage of IT expertise, but there are better candidates for digital transformation projects.

2. Application Integration

Application integration, sometimes called application-based integration, uses automated software tools to collect data from various sources, convert it to the appropriate format, and send it to its destination. This type of data integration frequently features open-source tools and pre-configured connections.

If your organization is looking for a way to integrate a limited quantity of data from a limited number of sources, application integration may be the right strategy for you. Enterprise digital transformation efforts may exceed the capabilities of this type of data integration.

3. Uniform Data Access Integration

Data virtualization is the key to this data integration technique. This strategy involves creating virtual versions of integration data that users can search and analyze without removing the core data from its secure location.

Uniform data access integration is a powerful solution for organizations looking to save on data storage in their integration process, provided demand does not increase.

4. Common Storage Integration

This data integration method, also known as data warehousing, consolidates data from multiple sources into an entirely new system built to transform, store, and serve data to users as needed. 

If your company has the financial and human resources to support the high cost of data warehousing and a need to perform complex data analysis tasks, this type of data integration could work for you.

5. Middleware Data Integration

Like manual data integration, middleware is pretty much what it sounds like. Middleware data integration relies on a third-party tool that serves as a technical layer between (or in the middle of) your operating system and applications to format and validate data as it moves between systems.

Middleware integration solutions come in various forms, some requiring technical expertise and others that are intuitive and easy to use, regardless of skill level.

This data integration technique is ideal for digital transformation initiatives and connecting legacy systems with more modern tools and solutions.

How to Choose an Integration Tool

According to the 2022 State of Enterprise Integration report, only 7% of enterprise IT professionals say their organization has successfully adopted an integration strategy, so if you’re still in the planning stages, you’re not alone. But how do you choose the solution that’s right for you?

Here are four key factors to consider when weighing different types of data integration:

• Basic requirements

Each of the five types of data integration we’ve discussed has different benefits and drawbacks. Make sure the strategy you select fits your organization’s needs. For example, if you need to scale operations up and down, manual coding is probably not the answer to your integration issues.

• Effects on your team

Some data integration techniques require a lot of technical skill or knowledge to implement and maintain. How will that affect your team? Skilled IT experts are already in short supply, so it’s wise to choose a solution that you know you’ll be able to handle.

• Daily operational impact

Understanding how you’ll access integrated data and how implementation and maintenance tasks will affect your business is also critical. Examine how disruptive the data integration technique you choose will be, and be sure your organization is prepared for the time it will take to deploy it and onboard staff.

• Business goals

A solution that meets your data integration needs now might not hold up in the future. Consider your longer-term goals beyond the immediate need to integrate, and choose a strategy that will support those outcomes as well.

Let the Integration Experts at Digibee Help

At Digibee, we eat, sleep, and breathe data integration. Our low-code iPaaS offers all the benefits of a middleware integration solution without any of the drawbacks. 

Our intuitive visual interface eliminates the need for niche expertise to create integrations and makes building integrations more efficient. Book a demo today to discover how Digibee can help you.

What are the biggest priorities for your business? If you asked that same question of everyone in your organization – or even just those in the c-suite – would you get the same answer? Probably not.

Going around the table, you might end up with multiple, often conflicting priorities from different areas of your organization. Getting everyone on the same page is hard enough with business-related issues, but when it comes to IT integration, conflicting priorities often delay business-critical integrations, or sideline projects altogether.

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

How Can You Get Everyone on the Same Page When it Comes to IT Integration?

To have a successful enterprise integration, business leaders must:

1. Identify conflicting integration strategies 
2. Decide on organization’s top priorities
3. Create a business plan on how to work together to achieve priority goals

Identifying Conflicting Priorities

According to the Digibee State of Enterprise Integration Report, five different types of integrations were generally ranked evenly as priorities, regardless of differing perspectives across the organization.

Many of these areas have competing but also overlapping functionality. To gain a better understanding of the conflicting priorities, let’s find out why these different types of integrations are considered priorities, and why they are important to your business.

What Are the Top Priorities for Integration Strategies

1. B2B Integrations

What is B2B integration?

Business-to-business (B2B) integration is when two or more companies connect and automate their business processes and related data.

Why is B2B integration important for your business?

It’s understandable why B2B partnerships are so important to business leaders today. B2B integration can help you gain a better understanding of your value chain with more overall insight into potential supply chain delays or roadblocks. Integrating B2B processes can also help streamline processes and build partnerships, which are becoming increasingly vital in today’s business landscape.

A B2B integration platform can combine complex data across multiple partner applications and transform that data into standardized formats for streamlined insights throughout your business ecosystem. Automating key business processes and protocols can enable your company to work and communicate more effectively and efficiently with your key business partners, suppliers, and customers. 

2. Data Integrations

What is data integration?

Data integrations are when data from multiple sources are combined into one single view. Gartner research shows there is momentum in the data integration tools market driven by multi-cloud and hybrid data integration requirements. According to Gartner, complex data transformation and flexibility of data movement are some of the key capabilities of data integrations.

Why is data integration important for your business?

The importance of data integration cannot be understated. There are several benefits to your business, such as improved data quality and integrity, automated data transfer, overall insights throughout your enterprise or business ecosystem, reduced costs and better return on investment (ROI), seamless data transfer between multiple systems, and real-time insights across the board, leading to better collaboration and decision-making capabilities.

3. System Integrations

What is system integration?

System integration involves connecting multiple disparate IT systems and applications to create one overarching cohesive system infrastructure.

Why is system integration important for your business?

System integrations can play a key role in your business, as they connect systems that don’t usually communicate with each other. Combining these systems can streamline processes and make your business more agile, resulting in increased productivity, more accurate insights and analytics, more informed management, reduced costs, and ultimately improved customer satisfaction.

4. Application Integrations

What is application integration?

According to Gartner, application integrations enable independently designed applications to work together. This can be a game-changer for your company in departments that use several different applications where integration would increase efficiency, and if you want to connect multiple applications across the enterprise.

Why is application integration important for your business?

Gartner states that application integrations can help orchestrate the flow of activities performed by several disparate software applications. They can also create consistent data across independent applications, and provide access and functionality from independently designed applications into a single interface for the user.

5. API Management

What is API management?

Application Programming Interface (API) management covers a broad range of functions. It encompasses the overall process of creating, publishing, managing, and analyzing API connections within an enterprise. Individual APIs include a set of operations available to app developers. According to Gartner, API management includes the people, processes, and technology used by an organization to safely and securely publish APIs.

Why is API management important for your business?

API management solutions distribute, control, and analyze APIs that connect applications and data. API management can enable digital transformation, manage internal and external relationships with API users, and drive business value from APIs. The value gained from an API management solution is largely dependent on the vendor selected to provide the service, so your business should do its homework before selecting the right business partner to work with.

It might appear that there is a lot of overlap in these competing priorities. An enterprise integration platform-as-a-service solution can integrate all of these competing priorities into one successful solution. In order to reach that goal, you need to define your priorities.

Clearly Define Priorities and Work Together to Achieve Them

While integration priorities were scored fairly evenly across all respondents in a Digibee Survey, this lack of a clear objective can result in potential conflicts among stakeholders, which can delay implementation and increase costs.

That’s why it’s important to clearly define your priorities when it comes to your strategic implementation. Internal alignment on an integration strategy is critical to a successful implementation.

As a business leader, you must work and collaborate with the other leaders in your organization to determine the top priorities for your overall business and work together to achieve them. The same principle applies to an IT integration strategy, whether your company’s leading priorities involve B2B integrations, data integrations, system integrations, application integrations, or API management.

According to the Digibee ebook ‘How to Decide on an Integration Strategy’, Gartner states that by 2025, more than 75% of midsize, large and global organizations will establish integration strategy empowerment teams to support collaborative integration.

Steps to Success

To get started, build your enterprise integration strategy focused on a single objective as a first step, and understand the roadblocks to enterprise integration. 

You can also take an overall approach with enterprise integration Platform-as-a-service. An iPaaS solution is a scalable subscription-based service that connects your current systems with new technologies and combines organizational data regardless of underlying silos or legacy infrastructure.

Successful, cost-effective integrations are achievable, and an iPaaS solution can help you reach your goals.

Learn more about Digibee’s innovative approach to integration. Download your free copy of the 2023 report or, if you prefer, contact our experts directly for more information.

Your data, fully integrated, in less than three weeks. Let Digibee show you how.

A business’s need to build and maintain customer relationships far predates the cloud or the internet. It even predates the Rolodex or the phone. Harnessing the power of sales and marketing in a business is nothing new, yet in that role one must always be future-facing; strategizing to adapt to new tools to keep the customer happy and the business on track.

A growing number of enterprise IT professionals are recognizing the value of integration to their operations, but do the advantages of enterprise application integration really matter to the marketing department?

The short answer: yes.

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

Balancing Customers, Relationships, and Management

With so many sales and marketing channels available now, a staggering amount of customer data is generated as users flow between them. 

Customer relationship management systems (or CRMs) were perhaps the earliest technical solution to the challenge of keeping your customer data organized. With various levels of sophistication, they have been helping support sales since the 1990s, first as stand-alone software, then also becoming an available component within the ERP systems of the day.

While this CRM integration into ERPs was a quantum leap forward in creating one holistic view of the many moving parts, there were still many limitations to relying on a software model.

Enterprise Integration: The Next Logical Step?

As far back as 2019, Forrester reported that “The enterprise resource planning (ERP) era is over.” Though the term ERP has tended to continue in usage, often being blended with EI as “ERP integration” or “ERP system integration”, the notion of an ERP as a single software omni-suite is quickly going the way of the CD-ROMs it was first distributed on. 

In a digital-first world where marketing now needs to employ analytics, SEO, lead capture/generation/nurturing, event marketing, ecommerce, and an ever-changing roster of social media tools, it’s not surprising that Gartner analysts predict that more than 85% of organizations will embrace a cloud-first principle by 2025.

As part of this trend, iPaaS for enterprise organizations are quickly coming to the attention of business leaders. By marrying the omnichannel approach of ERPs with the benefits of the cloud, enterprise integration provides flexibility without complexity.

3 Key Benefits of iPaaS for Marketing

There are several advantages of enterprise application integration that directly address marketing department priorities and challenges.

1. iPaaS Plays Well With Others

Being platform-agnostic is one such example of how a good iPaaS can provide such flexible no-hassle support. It doesn’t get hung up on whether the many tools you are trying to integrate are Microservices, APIs, or cloud-based. They can just as easily be cutting-edge or legacy. If SAP ERP integration is vital to your team’s success, it can now be completed quickly and with minimal downtime.

If your Social Media Manager finds themselves continuously switching between apps, an integration can bring focus and clarity to them while helping to deliver a consistent user experience to the customer. 

An effective enterprise ecommerce integration strategy can deliver benefits to both business and customer simultaneously:

“By integrating order fulfillment, a purchase on the website can use inventory information availability across warehouses and retail locations to determine the optimal place (both for the customer and for the business) to ship from based on destination.”

Sayer Martin, Forbes Council Member

2. iPaaS’ Security Keeps a Secret

Though security may not be the first thing that comes to mind for marketing, stop and ask yourself what happens in the aftermath of a data breach:

• What happens to your customer confidence, and your bottom line? 
• Who has to craft that message to try and regain trust? (And deal with all the negative customer feedback?)

Simply put, in a world where data breaches are routinely making headlines, moving to an enterprise iPaaS that offers 24/7 monitoring and unparalleled protection and security means less stress for your customer, which translates into less stress for you.

3. iPaaS Supports New Experiences

More so than any other department, marketing needs to be able to recognize and adapt to new trends. As part of this, you need the freedom to adopt the newest tools as soon as they become available.

An iPaaS with a low-code approach allows new tools to be integrated quickly and with less time stuck waiting for your internal developers, and reusable components make managing all the business logic behind them simple.

“Marketing is a science. It relies on real-time data and accurate analytics to shed light on current performance–what’s working and what isn’t–while informing decisions that drive future improvements. This synchronous environment is only possible if all systems are connected.” 

Cait Porte, CMO, Digibee

Implementation: Logical Steps & Common Missteps

Although there are clearly many benefits to a business, our recent State of Enterprise Integration Report found 71% of those polled are actively planning to adopt, supplement, or replace their integration technology.

While this is a majority, many businesses are ending up frustrated in their implementation efforts, reporting impediments that are the inverse of what an EI is meant to provide: 

• 39% impeded innovation
• 42% ineffective practices
• 36% lack of agility

Innovation, inefficiency, and agility are imperative in order to meet marketing objectives.

The root cause of these negative impacts is often a piecemeal approach to the original integration strategy. The high-level advantages of enterprise application integration may be well understood by the internal tech team tasked to bring it to fruition, but without collaboration with the C-suite and product owners, they lack a depth of understanding of other roles and how they work.

Where this happens it is easy to be left with a system that – while technically integrated – is in no way optimized for each individual team’s needs.

Compare these numbers to relevant numbers pulled from the 2022 SEI Report. Attempting to remediate this after the fact often results in a frustrating loop of building and fixing, with 98% of 2022 report respondents reporting they had to rebuild their integrations within a year.

Number of integrations that had to be rebuilt

The impacts of getting caught in this loop can include potential downtime where data is unavailable during rebuilds and then having to re-learn a whole new ERP system integration every time.

Stop the Stop-Gap Solutions

Anyone leading a marketing department already understands how vital a well thought-out strategy is to the success of a project. This strategic lens positions a CMO as an incredibly valuable contributor to a successful EI implementation.

With the changing responsibilities of today’s CMO, the role has often expanded to encompass every aspect of the customer experience. Requiring so many different platforms to generate this customer data, a CMO is poised to be one of the best advocates for ensuring the integration brings benefit to both the business and the customer.  

Remember the key elements a marketing team needs most: platform-agnostic, secure, and adaptable. The flexible solutions offered by Digibee are all three, meaning your ecommerce integration, CRM integration, and the integration of the many other tools your team relies on can be completed in weeks, not months. 

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

Financial institutions are facing a uniquely challenging technological landscape. As their customers increasingly demand the personalized digital experiences they enjoy in other sectors, banks are left having to bridge the gaps between ease-of-access and security, speed and accuracy, competitive fees and vast, complex data systems.

Their core banking system architecture is too important to risk with a cavalier approach, but more flexibility is needed to stay competitive and adapt to emerging trends. As a large financial institution, how can you facilitate the right change when there is so little room for error?

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

The Current State of Banking Technology 

Aging data centers and legacy systems still underpin the core banking system architecture used in financial sectors. When saddled with legacy back-end technology in banking core systems, which encompasses the essential services such as accounts, online payments, personal loans and mortgages, a bank has a lot of work to do to update their tech stack.

The fix is often not as simple as indiscriminately tearing out everything old and replacing it with the newest thing on the market. 

Take, for example, COBOL, a programming language still commonly used by banks today. It was developed in 1959, making it several years older than the average CEO. Is this legacy banking system ready for retirement? Sources disagree whether it represents an evolutionary dead end, or still provides core business value.

Mainframe and COBOL, when properly maintained, are still able to handle the daily transaction processing of an integrated banking system, and even 60+ years later IBM continues to provide updates and support. 

The connections between these complex systems must also be considered. Will the flexibility needed to modernize be found through native integration vs API? Roughly 40% of mid-sized banks don’t yet have an API strategy, as only the largest banks can afford the time and resource expenditure of building and maintaining all their own APIs with internal IT teams.

The Modern Banking Customer 

The modern banking customer has grown to expect easy access to their money and financial information. Although the reality of these transactions – which involve retrieving and transferring financial information between institutions who could be under differing governing regulations, and require connecting with a foreign bank integration API – is truly anything but, an app’s slick user interfaces make it all feel very simple from that user’s point of view. 

This sense of ease of use, and desire for empowerment is only expected to grow as a customer demand. Gartner lists the three evolutions of digital in financial services are:

• easier self-service transactions
• empowered customer journeys
• embedded financial relationships

As the FinTech sector grows, more competitors to traditional banking come online, eager and better-positioned to meet all of these technological opportunities. At the same time, many countries are making changes that impact the financial regulations governing their banks, meaning any advantage a traditional bank might have with years of history under its belt may be lost in the need to quickly pivot to align with a whole new mode of operation.

Open banking policies are a prime example of how shifts in financial regulations have demanded rapid change from the financial institutions of many countries.

“The financial system has been structured [over centuries] to protect bank details and has created internal strengths for that. Open banking changes this premise and establishes that the data is no longer owned by the bank. It is a violent cultural change.”

Carlos Augusto de Oliveira, director and coordinator of the technology forums of the Brazilian Banking Association (ABBC), on Brazil’s shift to open banking in 2020

Bridging the Gap with Enterprise Integration

Wherever you land on retiring the COBOL mainframe, or any other legacy banking system still in use in the financial world, the key takeaway is that the gap between traditional banking and the modern banking customer has to be bridged.

“(Banking) systems generally have technologies that are out of date with the needs and standards of security, performance and scalability that are required for today’s connected world.”

Peter Kreslins Junior, Digibee CTO and cofounder 

This still leaves a complex dilemma in front of banks: 

• Review their entire legacy system and find an internal way to make these API integrations feasible, or 
• Seek alternative platforms that work with focus on modern digital financial services. 

“I see this second option as a trend, the market is moving in that direction. With the platforms that connect more easily, banks enable and accelerate this integration without needing a high investment, which is essential, taking into account the tight schedule and limited budgets of some institutions,” points out the director of ABBC. 

Enterprise Integration Platform-as-a-Service, especially when supported by the right vendor with financial industry experience, provides an excellent option. A good iPaaS works to support legacy systems, giving the flexibility needed to allow a financial institution to marry the latest-and-greatest with the tried-and-true into one seamless system. 

When comparing API vs integration, especially iPaaS, the main factors to consider are cost and time needed to build. To build one new API integration, a developer must have a high level of skill and a deep understanding of the two specific systems being connected, with the bank integration API, making it a time-consuming and costly endeavor.

The shift to a low-code platform with pre-built reusable tools streamlines the API build process, and automation lends new levels of operational efficiency both to the building of the system and to maintaining it. 

Digibee Knows Banking Integration

Digibee has real-world experience working with banks that need to modernize banking core systems fast. In a partnership with a global banking institution, the 5th largest commercial bank in Brazil, Digibee successfully delivered a fully automated and secure integration solution in record time.

Whether your financial institution is trying to create an integrated banking system that relies on Microservices, ESB/Cloud, or APIs, Digibee’s local interface can connect and shift data securely to the Digibee platform in real-time.

Learn more about how Digibee can support your financial institution on its modernization journey or, if you prefer, request a demo to see our solution in action.