System integration in real life: drawing parallels between the two worlds
IT integration is a challenging area to tackle within an enterprise. It can be quite difficult to visualise just how businesses benefit from connecting disparate IT systems together. In this post, we draw comparisons between three methods to achieve a fast and simple integration and common everyday scenarios to help you understand the purpose of the process.?
iPaaS: a meal to satisfy your integration needs??
We’ve all experienced being too drained after a long day at work to cook a meal from scratch. Boiling rice or pasta, cutting up vegetables, figuring out which ingredients to use and measuring each one—the process seems time-consuming and exhausting before we've even begun! That’s when ready-made meals or, in other cases, meal kits come in handy.?
It's not too hard to find what you're looking for as a frozen pre-packaged meal at your local supermarket. They allow you to eat from a spectrum of flavours, dietary preferences, and cuisines at home without having the skills (or patience) to cook it all by yourself. This availability, convenience, and variety is very similar to an iPaaS solution. Firstly, an iPaaS makes the process of building integrations accessible to people without any IT expertise. Just as easily as popping your boxed meal in the oven, you can assemble quick integrations through the drag-and-drop, low-code interfaces that most iPaaS solutions provide. It also provides a wide range of pre-built connectors and APIs that help create different kinds of integrations for different types of scenarios and systems.?
Similarly, meal kits allow you to shorten the time and effort you take to prepare your meals as they come with portion sizes, ingredients, recipe cards, and so on. This is exactly how iPaaS technologies work, with reusable templates and in-built components that help you build a fundamental integration logic without needing to code individual modules of the functionality. Meal kits are also customisable since you can add or remove ingredients or steps to the recipes they come with. Since commercial meal kits are usually sold on a subscription basis, they also come with continuous updates, discounts, and communication that keeps the customer in the service loop. iPaaS solutions also offer a high degree of personalisation by letting users create custom integrations with code whenever necessary. They also come with continuous support, appropriate documentation, updates, and troubleshooting guidance that allow users to learn the ropes of the technology more smoothly.
Busy times at home call for a quick meal. A busy business calls for an iPaaS solution to take care of the grind.?
Red, yellow, green: automation as an integration traffic controller
Traffic signals do a good job illustrating the concept of automation. Although they are not a literal case or example of automation, they are responsible for orchestrating a sequence of events to occur at the right time (the timed movement of vehicles at a junction) to avoid crashes and collisions. This may reduce the need for the traffic police to be on guard at all times.? In the digital realm, automation similarly reduces human intervention, especially when we need to connect different applications together. AI-enabled automation simplifies workflows and interactions between diverse systems and components, enhances monitoring and analysis of historical data through its predictive capabilities, and ultimately streamlines business and decision-making processes.?
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Just as traffic signals prevent mayhem on the roads, automation steers data and interactions between your digital resources in the right direction.?
Vendors: reliable companions on your IT integration journey
Although vacations are supposed to be about relaxation, we often forget what they are meant for when we’re in the midst of planning them. Booking flights, drawing out a travel route, making arrangements for food and accommodation can all become overwhelming very quickly. A more time-saving alternative is opting for a travel agency that offers all-inclusive packages. In the business world, this is similar to procuring vendor solutions for your system integration. Since they come with the required software, services, and support, they can curb costs from getting out of hand (something that’s likely to happen if you create your own integration roadmap, or a travel itinerary in our real-world example). Just make sure to go for a vendor solution that suits your needs, updates their software at a reasonable pace, and supports their clients with best practices and solutions throughout the length of their service.?
All you need is some help from an enterprise integration specialist or vendor to reach your destination easily. Away you go!?
We would love to hear about some of your personal experiences that embody the art of integration in the comments below, and if you would like to dig deeper into this topic, we recommend our article entitled: "3 ways to implement a fast and simple enterprise integration solution".??
**Article written by Shwetha Mahendran , Technical Researcher at Chakray Consulting