What is Your Integration Strategy?

There are five things you need to consider when choosing an integration partner and/or integration software:

  1. What are your integration needs?
  2. Real-time or batch?
  3. Transaction volume
  4. Cost
  5. What is your integration strategy?

How much thought have you given to your integration needs? Many integration providers are not well-suited to really listen to you and build a solution that fits your needs. Will you be able to hand them a completed map of your expectations?

How about after the integration is finished? Will you need ongoing support? What happens to your integration when one of your integrated tools has an update?

Are you looking for a solution that will get you most of the way there or take you all of the way and stay with you for continued support? Depending on who you hire, you may need to make a choice:

Choose an integration solution that is mostly a provider of API endpoints and get your own (often overworked) IT staff to build out the solution.  Hope that they can learn the UI without adding too much time to the project.

Choose an integration solution from a turnkey integration provider.  This gets you out of a ton of “unknowns” in the integration mapping, transformation, and deployment process.  This also gets you a timeline (or at least an estimated timeline) so that you know when the integration will be ready.  The cost on this can vary dramatically.  But, as a general rule, get a customized quote.  The “general” quotes on turnkey solutions tend to guess high, expect the worst case scenarios and price themselves accordingly.

No matter what you choose to do about your integration needs, please consider Missing Link Technology in your plans.

If you have questions about any of this, please contact us.