There is no shortage of data integration solutions in the market – a quick google search will bring up dozens of solutions. When enterprise customers go shopping for a data integration solution, they first need to know what to look for in a current generation data integration solution.
Knowing some key drivers can help enterprises find the right solution for their needs. I have identified some key integration drivers that a modern-day data integration software offers, and I hope they will be useful in connecting the data integration dots for your enterprise.
1. Data Consistency
With the rise in IT consumerization, haphazard adoption of cloud technologies with little focus on consistent integration is creating setbacks for organizations. Enterprises are creating islands of automation and multiple sources of truth while amassing new technologies with differentiated design models. Marshaling the data stored in different systems becomes a big challenge.
A strong data integration platform maintains data lineage and helps organizations in setting up a single source of truth. Enterprises save valuable time that goes into collecting & sharing data, automating processes, and executing transactions reliably. The solution brings together data under a single hood, leading to consistent availability of data across the enterprise. A single view of data helps enterprises exchanging data safely with partners and customers.
2. Large File Data Ingestion and Streaming
Enterprises today deal with the exchange of terabytes of data in their ecosystem. Processing, mapping, and transporting this data to a data lake or warehouse is a major challenge. Manual methods of processing data are slow, cumbersome, and complex. Parsing data in large blocks and aggregating post processing is error-prone and complex. Data Appliances can solve this problem, but they are expensive and cumbersome to maintain.
A good data integration solution can fix this problem by queuing colossal amount of data in an orchestrated manner and moving it to a data lake. It helps business and IT teams handle large files and process them timely, without exceptions, and in a fraction of the cost of a data appliance..
An enterprise-class data integration solution provides quick access to data and automates data processing to all nodes and systems connected through it. End-to-end automation with exception handling makes sure that data serialization and transformation follows a specific pattern. Enterprises can leverage such tool for Big Data projects and solve many problems that require a heavy data interchange.
3. Self Service Opportunities to Empower Partner Data Exchange
To match the pace of business today, enterprises need to communicate effectively with partners and customers. Enterprises are struggling to connect with financiers, contractors, distributors, shippers, etc, but their existing data exchange frameworks is riddled with problems.
Many businesses still have ancient interfaces like File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or Managed File Transfer (MFT) for electronic data interchange (EDI). These protocols don’t scale to address the needs of modern-day data exchange. Therefore, it becomes intensely difficult to combine home-grown or manual applications with cloud-based applications. A functional data integration tool can help companies in combining technologies and minimizing debilitating errors.
An ideal data integration platform enables a simple path for partner data exchange. It streamlines data exchange between multiple partners, firms, and businesses by enabling self service for business users. It enables enterprises to onboard customers faster and become easy to work with. Start-to-end automation streamlines processes and lets operational users drive the process without relying on IT.
4. Intelligent Data Mapping
One of the key requirements of a strong data integration solution is the ability to map data across schemas. Data mapping gets trickier when the source and target use different data schemas. In such use cases, the onus is on the data integration solution to not only map the data but also map the data schema correctly.
An ideal solution provides intelligent data mapping solutions for transforming data between source and target. It supports any-to-any data transformation and handles all file formats and protocols.
That’s not all – current generation data mapping solutions are also equipped with AI to evolve with time and learn new mappings on the basis of past use cases.
5. Better Customer Experience
In many cases, enterprises set up independent interfaces to connect enterprise applications. They develop a new interface for every different use case with less clarity to what other teams are building. Things get difficult when teams develop many different interfaces which are hard to manage. Disruptions occur when a single change to one interface causes changes to other interfaces. Core services are delayed till the time teams rebuild these connections.
A modern-day integration solution helps businesses in building connections faster and delivering services better. With a good integration solution, operational users don’t have to wait for IT to build flows. It enables business partners in a complex network to transact information in a flexible way and deliver delightful customer experience. Moreover, enterprises can monetize their B2B ecosystem, become easier to work with, and accelerate time-to-revenue by up to 75%.
6. Change Management
Frequent innovation and deployment leave IT in a state of flux. In many cases, enterprises realize that legacy systems and new technologies are not conversing with each other. This is a major deterrent to adopting digital technologies. However, modernization is very important for keeping up with recent trends. Enterprise integration helps in overcoming these restraints and simplifies the path to new tech adoption.
A future-ready data integration tool puts companies on a faster path to new tech adoption. Users can leverage a point-and-click interface and intuitive development wizard to combine technologies and transform them into consumable services. Enterprises can add, modify, or remove functionalities without needing additional infrastructure. Seamless integration across applications and information architecture makes change management simple and feasible. Enterprises can make use of hybrid IT integration framework to integrate old and new systems quickly and easily.
The data integration sector is flooded with many players, and Enterprises should ensure they select a set of key drivers that are important for their use case before they start shopping for a solution. We hope our guide on the key drivers in data integration helps you achieve continued success from your investment.
