Why use a Processing Platform for Integrations?

Integrations are a big problem

Integrations are business-critical

Applications in your enterprise must be able to communicate with other applications both inside and external to your enterprise. That communication must be scalable, reliable, secure and fault-tolerant. This communication is the lifeblood of your business.

Integration is dirty job!

Integrating applications is hard, dirty work, probably ranking near the bottom of a preferred task list in technology. Would you rather go build the cool new mobile app, or figure out how that dinosaur of a mainframe invoicing system is coughing out invoices so you can integrate it with the CFO's brand new acocunting system?

• Data formats, data meaning, batch sizes, exhange protocols, security mechanisms (and more!) are often different between the systems you are trying to integrate, even if those system purport to comply with the same standards.
• You normally don't have any control over either end of the integration, forcing you to conform to two or more immovable "opinions" of how data should look and how it should be exchanged.
  • Even when the applications you're integrating with are internal, the timeline to change them often is far longer (sometimes infinity) than the time alloted by the business to operationalize an intgration
• Applications that are part of the integration are rarely scalable, reliable or fault-tolerant; therefore, the integrations that enable them must be.
• Every new application in your enterprise generally means one or more integrations, leading to an explosion of integrations that must be managed and maintained (and constantly break as the integrated systems drift).

Integrations are often one-offs

Due to the requirements, integrations are often built as one-off, bespoke code that never gets reused again. This occurs because building an integration between two applications, and making it reliable and fault-tolerant is hard enough. Building an integration that integrates with many applications increases the complexity exponentially, and most businesses and engineering shops simply don't have the time or budget (or skill set?) to do that.

Over time, this leads to a massive system of undocumented connections that everyone is deathly afraid to touch, as there is no way to know what ripple effects a change to the system will have on the business. You may not even know of all of the integrations present in your enterprise. Your business-critical lifeblood, that you must manage and maintain, has become unmanagable and unmaintainable.

Integrations take a long time

Whether it's getting specifications for the applications, developers to write the integration, support to install and test the integration, or operational resources (e.g. - servers), integrations from start to finish can take a very long time. Time that many IT shops do not have. Time that the business needs can't wait for, causing increased expenses and lost revenue.

EchoStream is the solution

EchoStream raises integrations in your enterprise to first-class application status, on par with your other major applications. Doing this has some huge benefits.

EchoStream provides visibility

With EchoStream, you can see all of your integrations in one pane of glass. This provides transparency to what was a previously opaque system. Furthermore, it allows you to analyze the impact of changes to that system prior to making them, thereby removing the risk of changes to your integrations.

EchoStream makes the hard easy

As detailed above, integrations must be scalable, reliable, secure and fault-tolerant, in addition to actually taking data from one application and delivering it to another application.

While EchoStream cannot completely remove the difficulty of data conversion, it does remove the need for you to worry about scalability, reliability, security or fault-tolarance as the platform does all of that for you, out of the box.

Additionally, EchoStream makes the difficulty of managing data transformation, augmentation and delivery much easier. For example, consider a mainframe that emits a CSV file every 15 minutes, and that CSV file must be broken up into individual lines, converted to JSON, and delivered to 3 different applications that each have their own custome JSON format. Futhermore, rows in the CSV file must be conditionally delivered to receiving applications based upon the data in the rows. In EchoStream, this scenario can be built, tested, and moved into production in less than a day. In comparison, for most businesses such an integration would require weeks (if not months) of planning, resource allocation and work.

EchoStream prevents the one-offs

By using EchoStream as an integration platform, each connected application only needs to connect once - to EchoStream, in the format preferred (or required) by the application. You can manage the routing, transformation, processing, delivery, and even message construction within EchoStream.

What does this mean for your business and your IT department? That you can retire almost all of that really scary, opaque code that is currently running your integrations and replace it with EchoStream.

EchoStream is Cloud Native

No longer will you have to find space for another virtual machine on an already overloaded virtual machine stack. Resources in EchoStream are in the Cloud, and provisioned for you in near-real time. In fact, you may find that you can repurpose/retire many of the virtual machines currently running integrations, giving back longetivity to your existing hardware purchases.

EchoStream gives you flexibility

Developing integrations in EchoStream is far faster and much easier than traditional integration methods, making your business more agile and your IT department more responsive. Instead of having to explain to business leaders (who do not understand) why it will take six months and a ton of money to integrate, you can now tell them that the integration will be complete in days or weeks (or sometimes hours!). Go from Zero to Hero in one meeting!