As organizations increase the number of systems they use, the need to integrate them will only grow.
After all, allowing on-prem systems and cloud applications to operate in silos prevents employees from accessing the data they need, when they need it, to carry out their work.
To help you integrate systems effectively, we’ll cover several examples you’ll likely care about, the benefits of implementing them, the challenges you might face when building them, and more.
It’s the process of connecting systems, typically SaaS applications, so that they can share specific data freely with one another at a predefined cadence.
It’s worth noting that there are other interpretations of system integration. We’ll review all of them next.
As you research system integrations, you’ll likely come across the following types:
For the purposes of this article, we’ll focus on internal and customer-facing integrations.
Here are just a few common system integrations you can build:
Note: The first two examples of system integration are customer-facing while the remaining two are internal.
Say you want to make it easier for clients to add, modify, and remove users in your product.
To help them, you can integrate with clients’ human resource information systems (HRISs) and let clients sync employees from their respective systems with your platform.
More specifically, if an employee gets deactivated on the HRIS, they’re removed as a user in your product; if the employee is added to the HRIS, they’re added as a user, along with the appropriate role based on their background; and if they’re modified in the HRIS, their modified accordingly in your product.
Now imagine that you offer a product that identifies security vulnerabilities in a client’s code base.
To help a client identify any issue your product pinpoints, you can connect your product with their ticketing system and build a sync where once you uncover an issue, a ticket gets created in the affected client’s system. The ticket can include details on the issue to help your team understand and resolve it quickly.
To help your customer success managers (CSMs) stay on top of their accounts more easily and effectively, you can integrate your data warehouse (e.g., Snowflake) with your business communications platform (e.g., Slack) and build a flow where once a client crosses a certain level of product usage, the assigned rep receives a notification in your business communications platform.
Within the message, the customer success manager can learn more about the client and usage threshold they reached, allowing the CSM to follow-up with the client in a more personalized, thoughtful way.
Your employees are likely to sign a wide range of documents over time, from offer letters to non-disclosure agreements. To help you store, access, and review documents in a way that’s convenient and secure for your team, you can connect your HRIS with your file storage system and build a sync where once an employee document is added or modified in your HRIS, the same set of actions take place in the employee’s folder within your file storage system.
The benefits of system integration largely depend on the type of system integration you build. That said, they generally offer the following benefits:
Unfortunately, the process of integrating systems can prove difficult.
Assuming you’re looking to integrate applications via their APIs, here are a few common challenges you’ll likely come across, based on our research.
To help you reap the benefits of system integration while avoiding any of the roadblocks, we’ll break down several popular types of solutions you can use to integrate systems.
An iPaaS lets you connect on-prem and cloud-based systems that are used internally and develop data flows across them. Depending on the vendor, you may also be able to use the platform to develop and manage API endpoints, workflow applications, or build customer-facing integrations (i.e., embedded iPaaS).
The platform’s versatility can be invaluable. Moreover, its integrations are generally secure, performant, and reliable. That said, the platform often requires technical expertise to use. In addition, the platform only allows you to build one integration at a time, which can prevent you from scaling your integration builds effectively.
RPA software involves using custom scripts (i.e., “bots”) to automate tasks at the UI level.
The platform is great in that it allows you to connect all types of systems, regardless of whether they offer APIs. In addition, a few established RPA vendors have purchased iPaaS solutions, allowing you to build both UI and API-based integrations with a single vendor.
However, like iPaaS solutions, RPA tools are often highly technical to set up. In addition, as you build more bots, the level of effort required to maintain the platform will increase exponentially.
A unified API solution (also known as a universal API solution) offers a single, aggregated API that lets you add hundreds of integrations to your product.
In addition, using Merge, the leading unified API solution, you can access intuitive yet robust Integration Observability tooling to manage each integration; receive integration maintenance support from Merge’s Partner Engineers; provide deep integrations through Merge’s Common Models and advanced features, like Field Mapping, and more.
Learn how Merge can help your team integrate at scale by scheduling a demo with one of our integration experts.
