Graham has been an invaluable asset from the word go. He has helped us to build and implement a strategy to make a big technological leap as a business to work more efficiently and improve our offering to clients.
-- Matthew Houliston, Serve Legal Ltd
Code-Native Integration
Sometimes you just need to roll up your sleeves and write some code.
20 years ago most enterprise grade integrations would have been code based. Today a large proportion of integration projects are successfully delivered using low-code, rapid development integration tools.
But sometimes those tools aren't suitable.
Reusable components available in a low-code iPaaS that facilitate rapid integration may lack the fine grained control you need for very specific integration requirements. The commercial model from low-code/no-code integration providers might not work for very high volume integration scenarios. For very technical teams who are used to working with automated tests and CI/CD it might just be more efficient and more cost effective to take a code-native approach to integration.
However, that does not mean you should start with a blank canvas. There are several code-native frameworks and toolkits upon which you could base your project.
We help you evaluate the following areas in order to setup your code-native integration project for success:
- Approach - message broker (smart pipes, dumb endpoints) vs event stream (smart endpoints, dumb pipes)
- Infrastructure - self hosted (RabbtMQ, Kafka, Artemis etc) vs cloud (AWS SQS, Confluent, Azure Event Hub etc)
- Integration patterns - optimise for performance, security, auditability, scalability
Low-Code Integration
We help companies build enterprise value, and integrating the IT estate is one of the keys to successfully achieving this.
An integrated IT estate means that your mission critical systems can share data. Eliminating data silos and allowing data to flow freely across your business enables you to become data driven and automated.
A data driven organisaion can take the guess work out of their decision working. But even more than that, having reliable data available on a timely basis allows you to shift from trying to understand what did happen to being able to better forecast what will happen.
An automated organisation is more agile, it reduces errors, it CAN BE more secure, it frees teams to focus on higher value tasks and it scales better. It is also a key ingredient of being recognised as a tech enabled business, which is good for your company valuation.
iPaaS tools are a highly effective way for most organisations to integrate their IT estate in a time efficient manner, observing enterprise grade integration principles in a way that is maintainable over time as the IT estate changes.
Over the years we have evaluated and worked with many iPaaS solutions and we know how to pick the right tool for the job.
Take a look at our Systems Integration Buyer's Guide for a summary of the iPaaS market.
No-Code Integration
A no-code iPaaS can empower citizen integrators across an organisation to fetch the data they need on-demand and to automate their day-to-day tasks, freeing up their limited time to solve high value problems.
Eliminating such busy-work is a great way to drive operational efficiency and increase profit margins.
This is achievable by giving non-technical business teams the building blocks to create integrations using graphical, or even AI powered integration builders. While this can enhance agility by removing the IT department, or even an outsourced partner, as a bottleneck care must be taken to ensure your citizen integrators don't create an integrated nightmare.
Data privacy policies must be observed, so it is vital that appropriate access controls are put in place. Integration principles should be defined and enforced to ensure you aren't left with an unmanageable mess of standalone integrations, each developed using different and non-standard techniques. You must also pay attention to costs because it is too easy for the citizen integrator to bust your budget by shifting large, historic datasets on a regular schedule, when small deltas would be faster, cheaper and less likely to cause performance problems with your mission critical systems.
We help you choose the right tools and the right techniques to extract full value while avoiding the pitfalls of no-code integration.
Grahams expertise cannot be overstated! He was incredibly valuable in guiding us through a new technical project and ensuring the project was to be delivered to our spec and in budget. He's a very rare case of top technical knowledge, commercial accumen and crafting 'laymen explanations' to complex issues.
-- Matthew Walsh, IMRG
Learn More About The Consulting Services We Offer
Making Smart Technology Investments
All of the services we offer at Full Stack Consulting are centred around the principle of helping you to make the right technology investments. Investments that power massive growth for your business.
We understand that the wrong technology investments burn cash, tie up your people and destroy value, and that is particularly true in the case of systems integration projects. Such projects have multiple sources of complexity, here are three of the biggest:
People - different systems tend to have different owners. When systems are integrated there is a greater requirement for cross team collaboration, responsibility and decision making.
Data - where does data come from, where is it going, how does it get validated, how does it get enriched, what is the authoritative source?
Systems - multiple systems that all talk a different language, have different performance capabilities and different securty mechanisms.
Our consulting service will:
- Identify the right integration technology for your business
- Ensure it is implemented effectively
- Support your business in adapting to new ways of working to extract full value from your integrated IT estate
- Pragmatically (aka, when it make sense) optimise and automate your business processes
- Accelerate innovation and reduce time to market
- Help your business to scale
Our battle tested playboook that has been refined by working with multiple teams, industries and technology stacks, plus a wide range of real world business challenges can deliver value to your business from day 1.
Get in touch today to discuss the impact you could make to your business by hiring a systems integration consultant.
In the short space of time that Graham has been working with Serve Legal his contribution has been really positive. We are grateful for his expertise and insight!
-- Julian Sargeson, Co-Owner, Serve Legal Ltd
Our Specialisms
Your company probably has disconnected systems and siloed data.
That is probably stifling your growth.
We will help you connect your systems and liberate your data to optimise efficiency, automate processes and drive sales.
As full stack consultants we understand the technical details of integrating systems, the complexitiy around reconciling data from different systems and the commercial realities by which a project succeeds or fails.
Having been hands-on through several integration paradigms, starting some 20 years ago with bespoke coding from a blank canvas, implementing message brokers, ESBs and iPaaS tools, our specialism lies in knowing what is the best tool for a particular job, how to leverage that tool for maximum value and defining the business case that will secure the necessary investment to undertake the project.
For the reader who is interested in the more technical aspects of integration, take a look at our article from 2020 describing the components of an integration platform, how they fit together and the transformative impact they can have on your business.
I have worked with Graham on a number of system integration projects over the last 3 years, Graham has always been extremely knowledgeable, diligent and excellent at producing and interpreting detailed specifications. I know I can rely on Graham to help out if and when issues arise.
-- Denis Jenkins, The Scouts Association
Costs
Review our consulting rates here.