A typical application to application integration is about connecting disparate applications and exchanging data. Data is exchanged based on business rules that govern what data needs to be sent and when. Effort involved in implementing integration solutions is still primarily the domain of IT. What Adeptia Connect does is that it enables business users to be part of this effort, where IT is in charge of security and governance, and business users (Citizen Integrators) are in charge of creating and managing connections with trading partners and applications.
So let’s look a little deeper into what Adeptia Connect offers that enables citizen integration:
1. Self-service integration platform for your clients
Data resides in multitudes of applications today. Some in applications that exist in the cloud, some on-premise. The application landscape is heterogeneous, and you need a simpler way to solve the function of finding the data from these applications and consuming it in a meaningful way. And this is where the need to depend on IT to develop APIs for your business team to connect to these applications is not going to work and it’s not scalable. Business users understand the data and the ability for them to connect and consume information in order to speed up the process of delivering solutions and services to their customers is key, and this is where having an integration strategy that enables business users to use Adeptia Connect to get to the data quickly is so important. Application integration needs to get as easy as using Facebook.
Providing a simple self-service integration platform for your business users is key to onboard clients quickly and accelerate services delivery.
2. Allowing your trading partners to connect to your systems in minutes
How does a company connect their employee HR system to a payroll service provider? How long does it take; weeks or months? How do you sync up your Shopify eCommerce platform with your supplier’s ERP system? Is there an easy way to allow your business partners to connect their applications to your applications quickly and securely without involving complex APIs and heavy reliance on IT to come up with a solution. Companies are coming up with APIs to provide the connectivity options for other companies. But this requires involving IT and what if your trading partners don’t have the skill set or the developers to consume those APIs? Your customer’s application integration capabilities often vary in terms of how they can provide you data and therefore having an integration solution with pre-built library of application-to-application connectors that provide rich, graphical, wizard-driven connectivity options to your trading partners is important in order to onboard their data quickly with ease.
3. Centralized integration hub to connect to any customer application
Think about the complexity of building an API and more importantly how do you want your customers to connect to those APIs. One would need to think about the following features in addition to first defining the APIs:
- Authorization policies based on metadata and content
- Supporting versions of APIs as you make revisions over time
- Issuing and managing API keys and renewing OAuth tokens
- Guaranteed request delivery and notifications
- Custom building self-signup and enrollment portal for your partners
Building an API strategy is time-consuming, it takes huge amount of your capital expenditure, it requires hiring a team of expensive developers and more often the trading partners or customers you are dealing with have no technical ability to consume your APIs. What you need is not an API strategy, although that may work with connecting to large companies who most often would dictate their own API policies on how you can connect to them, rather you need a simpler Cloud-based integration portal that allows your customers and trading partners to self-register, discover your library of published business connections and enroll in minutes. An integration hub such as Adeptia Connect which is built for business users and governed by IT is key to expanding your customer base.
Key Takeaways of Adeptia Connect
So here are the key takeaways as to why Adeptia Connect is making it easy for your Citizen Integrators to connect with applications and clients with ease.
- Application to Application integration is solved but it’s solved by IT and managed by the IT. It’s an IT-driven initiative from start to finish. Thus a slow IT response makes it harder for you to adjust to a dynamic business environment where your customers are forcing you to respond to their needs quickly and efficiently.
- Think about out-of-the-box architecture that allows business users to be the leaders in connecting and consuming data and where IT governs the functions that business can perform but they are not the bottleneck in providing integration solutions to their business. Business users are empowered through a self-service integration platform to develop solutions on their own.
- API strategy is old, not scalable and gets hard to manage. It’s complex, requires custom architecture as the number of systems and data changes over time and most often not that many companies are able to consume them to begin with.
- Thus you need a simpler approach such as Adeptia Connect to allow businesses to connect with each other and onboard data through a social approach of discovery, approvals and using published list of shared connections.