Companies focus on their core business since long. Movement of goods and value added logistics are widely regarded as commodity services. Any manufacturer, wishing to deliver its products, will find it hard to beat the cost and quality levels of a professional logistic service provider. However, this conviction is not commonly accepted when it comes to the movement of data – nor to ‘value added processing’ such as data transformation. This blog takes a closer look at the cost and quality levels of an integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) – read: Yenlo’s Connext.
The challenges of integrations
The management of integrations comes with challenges of technical, functional and organizational nature. In general, the IT industry as a whole has been successful in separating ‘functionality’ from ‘technology’. However, such a separation can still be a real challenge for integrations. The reason is that integrations bridge across autonomous organizations, both functionally and technically – which are still closely interlinked for integrations.
Sure, many integration platforms provide smooth drag-and-drop facilities to map data between applications. However, that’s not all there is. For example, when you must deal with legacy of various sorts. Or when you need to expose selected business data to third parties, through public or private APIs. Under those circumstances, you will find that a close interaction between functional and technical specialists is crucial. If they don’t understand each other, you will run into misunderstandings and delays. In turn, that will jack up your costs, not to mention the people pointing at each other.
Connext is designed, from the start, to resolve such challenges. Essentially, Connext takes all the technical care for an integration platform out of your hands, so that you can fully focus on the exploitation of APIs and services – your core business. And very important, you can expect Yenlo’s specialists to quickly sort out if an issue relates to the integration platform or not. We’ve given efforts to realize Connext with clear boundaries, saving you the nasty finger pointing between departments and/or providers. We consider that as a condition for success, when integrations present already enough challenges otherwise.
Cost levels of integrations
So what cost levels apply to integrations? First of all, distinguish between the integration platform itself, and the individual services and APIs running on it. For each of the two, an overview is presented below. As you can immediately verify, Connext fully covers the integration platform.
| INTEGRATION PLATFORM (WSO2) | Typically by DevOps engineer | Yenlo Connext offering |
| Initial investment | ||
| knowledge buildup | for installation and maintenance | Yenlo Training (limited) |
| find your way | reuse and tuning of best practices | very limited in case of Connext |
| install & config – manual | TST, UAT, PROD environments | for Connext: automated deployment pipeline |
| logging, monitoring, alerting, analytics | platform related | covered by Connext |
| deployment pipeline | for patches and releases | covered by Connext (automated deployment pipeline) |
| containerize | optional | release calendar Connext |
| Annual recurring costs | ||
| knowledge maintenance | requires regular hands on | very limited in case of Connext |
| infra (on premise or Cloud) | depreciation or subscription fee | covered by Connext |
| infra maintenance | repairs, OS patches & upgrades | covered by Connext |
| platform maintenance | WSO2 repairs, patches, upgrades | covered by Connext (automated deployment pipeline) |
| internal support | 1st & 2nd line | by customer |
| external support | 3rd line, for urgent matters | covered by Connext (SLA) |
| product support | for bug fixing, patches, releases | covered by Connext |
| Life cycle management | ||
| functional extensions | development support | Yenlo Development support |
| transition cost at end | lower cost IF platform runs stateless | Connext runs stateless |
Every senior IT manager will recognize the risks here, hidden in overly optimistic cost calculations, or when not implementing your platform to run stateless. The automatic CI / CD pipeline of Connext ensures regular updates, so you’re not stuck with the same old version for years- otherwise still quite common.
So, Connext enables you to focus on delivering services and APIs – your core business. What cost elements are relevant on this level?
| SERVICES / APIs (ARTEFACTS) | Typically by developer | Yenlo offering |
| Initial investment | ||
| knowledge buildup | for development activities | Yenlo Training Program |
| find your way | reuse and tuning of best practices | 200+ years of experience |
| functional requirements | customer’s core business | by customer |
| design & development | services and APIs | 200+ years of experience |
| logging, monitoring, alerting, analytics | per artefact | 200+ years of experience |
| deployment pipeline | for artefact deployment | covered by Connext (automated deployment pipeline) |
| Annual recurring costs | ||
| knowledge maintenance | requires regular hands on | 200+ years of experience |
| technical maintenance | service repairs and optimizations | Yenlo Development support |
| functional maintenance | customer’s core business | by customer |
| internal support | 1st & 2nd line | by customer |
| external support | 3rd line, for urgent matters | Yenlo Operational Support |
| Life cycle management | ||
| additional services | development support | Yenlo Development support |
| transition cost at end | lower cost IF based on open source standards | Yenlo favors open source standards |
The functional part of it must rely on your product owners. With everything else, Yenlo offers support. We can help you accelerate the development of your APIs and services to go live, avoiding the pitfalls.
Quality levels of integrations
As a specialized service provider, Yenlo believes that you will find it hard to beat Connext and our expertise behind it, rather than doing it all yourself.
Of course, you can train your own technical specialists to install, configure and maintain your integration platform. In that case, I strongly recommend to train two senior specialists if you want to avoid a single point of failure. Take note, integrations normally support primary business processes. Expect your specialists to need time in order to acquire detailed understanding (this is not different from acquiring SAP expertise, for example). In the meantime, you will find it hard to pinpoint the cause of many issues.
And later, when a technical specialist moves on to another function or employer, someone else has to start from scratch again. We’ve seen this being neglected, if there’s no integration development necessary at that time, resulting in the other specialist becoming a single point of failure. While your business continuity is at stake. We’ve had desperate calls to help out immediately. You may get there on your own, but it will take you more time and cost more money (also in maintenance!), with more errors along the way.
By now, you will guess what I’m hinting at. Yenlo doesn’t only offer Connext as an excellent integration platform, but also has the team behind it to deliver the right quality and the continuity, from the start. And like any specialized service provider, we deliver more efficiently, because integrations are our core business for a long time.
Conclusion
The cost elements of integrations were presented, showing which of these elements are covered by Connext. When you calculate these in a realistic way, you will recognize Connext as an attractive proposition on cost level. Connext delivers the integration platform out-of-the-box (OOTB), well equipped to automatically deploy and run your APIs and services. In terms of the choice Buy / Build / Rent, Connext offers the Rent-option, being based on annual subscription fees.
But there is more to consider. Yenlo’s combined 200+ years of dedicated experience with WSO2 and integrations is at your disposal, just from our current workforce, not counting overall IT experience and additional specialized experience as acquired over the past 10+ years. So Yenlo presents an attractive proposition on quality level just as well !
Together, this should make the point: Yenlo’s Connext reduces the cost of your integrations.
