Integrating data can be a daunting task in the complex environments of today’s business world. Different business units have commonly been siloed historically, leading disconnected sources of data. As we try to move the business ahead using a cohesive strategy, one of the first steps is bringing all of our data together.
This often starts with a data integration partner, and a long-term road map for application systems overall. Let’s look at how to plan a data warehouse project.
Your Application Roadmap Checklist
This quick checklist to will help you launch your Application Roadmap. Use this checklist to come up with more questions about your current data infrastructure. When you’re ready to move forward, bring the right people together and take the time to build out a comprehensive plan for where you want to take your application infrastructure.
- Take Stock of Your Current Systems
What systems are currently in place? How are they working?
What systems do you know you’ll be adding?
How do these impact our plan to manage our data?
- Where is Your Data Stored?
Reach out to your employees to see what data they’re keeping.
What CRM’s, ERP’s, Marketing, POS, or Order Entry software stores data?
Is your data digitized?
- Clean Up Your Data
Do you have bad data that needs to be purged?
Do you have old data that could be archived(speeding up searches and integrations)?
Do you have a data maintenance plan?
- Set Goals Around Your Data?
What are your data security goals?
Who in your company should be able to leverage data?
Who in your company is responsible for your data?
Choosing an Integration Path
Great! You’ve figured out what your applications need to do, and what requirements you have for sharing data between them. You’ve got the most important part out of the way! But, we still need to make our dreams a reality. And for that, we need to look at integrating all that data.
Let’s start by deciding how we’ll make the magic happen.
Living On Easy Street
In our first example our client, Widgets Etc., is using Salesforce.com with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. They’d like to pass some simple data from one to the other. Great News, Everyone! There are built in connectors for these two products. By simply following the documentation in the help portal, we can complete basic data integrations between them.
“Talk is Cheap. Show me the Code.” – Linus Torvald
In our second example, Widgets Etc. has now let us know that they all use a legacy system for marketing. Their old CIO built it back in 1996, and they’ve been using it with manual data integration since. In this scenario, we’ll have to have a developer come in and build an API into that application. We can then connect it to our other data sources.
“We are moving slowly into an era where big data is the starting point, not the end.” – Pearl Zhu
In our final example, Widgets Etc. has reviewed their Application Roadmap, and realizes that they’ll need to integrate a few other systems while following strict business rules about where and how data gets moved between applications. For this, we’ll often bring in a Data Warehousing partner. The decision here should largely be built around the available connections offered by the partner and their ability to process the business rules Widgets Etc. has outlined. Take a look at the chart below for more information.
Still not sure where to begin? Reach out to us at info@alt-solut.com and speak to one of our consultants.
| Area | Mulesoft | Informatica Cloud | Stitch | TIBCO Scribe |
| Focus | Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), application integration | Data integration, ETL | Data ingestion, ELT | Data Integration, ELT |
| Database replication | Incremental replication depends upon manually written SELECT statements | Full table; incremental via change data capture | Full table; incremental via change data capture or SELECT/replication keys | Full Table; incremental via change data capture or SELECT statements built with GUI |
| SaaS sources | About 70 | More than 80 | More than 100 | More than 200 |
| Ability for customers to add new data sources | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Connects to data warehouses? Data lakes? | No / Yes | Yes / Yes | Yes / Yes | Yes / Yes |
| G2 customer satisfaction | 4.5/5 | 4.0/5 | 4.8/5 | 4.1/5 |
| Support SLAs | Yes | Available | Available | |
| Purchase process | Requires a conversation with sales | Requires conversation with sales | AWS Store, Conversation with Sales, Stitch Website | Requires conversation with sales |
| Compliance, governance, and security certifications | HIPAA/HITRUST, GDPR, Level-1 PCI-DSS, SOC 2, FIPS | HIPAA, SOC 2, SOC 3, Privacy Shield | HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2 | GDPR, ISO27001, SOC2/3 and PCI |
| Data sharing | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Vendor lock-in | Requires conversation with sales | Annual contracts. No open source | Month to month or annual contracts. Open source integrations | Multiple options. |
| Developer tools | Runtime Manager REST API, CloudHub API | Informatica Developer Tool, REST API, Connector Toolkit | Import API, Stitch Connect API for integrating Stitch with other platforms, Singer open source project | Scribe SDK, Spotfire Developer Tools, REST API, Node.js Apps |
| Free Trial? | 30 Day | Options Available | 14 Day | 30 Day |
