System Integration Services: An Essential Part of Business Digital Transformation

System integration brings together processes and tools to make them work effectively as one connected system, and is often a massive effort. But why would a company need such a transformation? A business doesn't evolve in a straight line. The environment and the market change constantly, and so do client requirements; companies need to tailor their processes to meet these new challenges. Whenever a technology-driven business faces the need to change any process, it looks for technology and service providers who can support its digital transformation while ensuring the solution's viability and maintainability for at least 5 to 10 years.

Such changes can be stressful, especially for big-league players, incumbents, and enterprise-grade companies, simply because their entire systems landscape incorporates decades' worth of effort from numerous companies and individuals, all creating and changing various software platforms and modules over time. Sometimes, the original knowledge of these systems is lost to history, and it's not easy to simply replicate the underlying business logic in new software. To keep up with the fast pace of digital transformation, it's often necessary in such cases to keep old systems alive – if only for the time being – through incremental legacy system modernization, while making them compatible with modern technology. The bigger the business, the more varied the processes it needs to manage. Transformation means uniting or replacing existing solutions supporting these processes with new ones that address these new challenges. This is where business meets a need for system integration.

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What is system integration

System integration (SI) is the process of connecting disparate software systems, applications, and components into one coordinated, functional whole. It links all business processes together, ensures a single point of communication between internal teams and external partners, and enables an organization to operate its diverse tools as one coherent system.

A system integrator's task is to physically or functionally connect disparate components into a single technical solution that supports the required business functions. System integrators use different methods and techniques to integrate multiple separated units. Some common approaches include:

• business and system analysis
• computer networking
• standards development
• application integration services
• business processes management
• middleware engineering
• design of application programming interfaces (API integration) and service buses
• custom software development

Stages of the transformation journey

As system integration is about establishing connections between diverse processes and software, it serves mid-sized and large companies, enterprises and industry giants.

System integration is applicable for businesses that are big and complex enough:

• to have separated processes for different business activities
• to use extended communication cycles to connect internal teams and departments with external partners
• to use a lot of software to automate business processes
• to solve industry-specific tasks
• to require processing data from multiple sources

Many sectors, verticals and fields may require system integration: Telecom, Finance and Banking, Real Estate and Construction, Commerce, Media, Education, Health, Transport, Manufacturing and others. Consumers of system integration services are companies that:

• do not run IT as their core business
• use IT solutions to solve their core business tasks
• require a solution that doesn't exist in a ready-to-implement form
• or such ready-to-implement solutions imply huge upfront costs which are hard to justify in terms of ROI

Deciding on your integration strategy

By its nature, system integration is a massive-scale initiative with prolonged effects. That is why it is essential to first develop a business strategy from a long-term perspective before starting the digital transformation. A tool or software solution itself won’t bring drastic changes. Transformation comes from management and strategy, from understanding business goals, transferring goals to tasks and defining ways of fulfilling these tasks.

So, strategic decisions on how to transform a business come first and result in technology. It is not the system integration’s role to change a company. Tools usually do not produce problems; leadership more often does. To avoid common mistakes and make system integration efforts painless, keep in mind the following points when planning digital transformation for your business:

• Apply system integration in your core business silos. Do not isolate the new technology from your main tasks – integrate your existing systems and applications instead.
• Treat system integration as a core business activity. Do not separate transformation from the main processes – it is no less vital to the business.
• Understand what you do, even if you rely on your system integrator. Do not trust transformation blindly; make sure all the offered solutions correspond to your business tasks and processes.
• Keep in mind that system integration is a tool, not a goal. Business needs and goals are the driving forces of any transformation.
• Plan system integration and implement digital transformation as a long-term project in your business development strategy.
• Grow in-house talent during the process; relying solely on a system integrator would be too dangerous for the long run.
• Foresee new risks that system integration may bring upon your business, research them and be ready to handle risks properly.

The integration process: phases, practices, and legacy modernization

Since system integration is the result of the need to tailor business processes and solve new business tasks or to boost performance, it requires well-thought preparations, precise implementation and assistance with the operation and further updates.

Analysis – the vital phase of system integration

Digital transformation is an answer to calls and changes in a business landscape, so a system integrator starts with complete business and system analysis. This phase requires the most effort and attention, as it includes:

• business requirements analysis
• business processes analysis
• business goals analysis
• existing systems analysis
• pain-point identification
• business tasks analysis
• best practices research
• negotiations with all stakeholders
• consultations on existing solutions
• recommendations on tools, software, techniques and methods
• making a system integration plan
• specifying vendors of solutions

To make a long story short, at this stage, a system integrator puts together an offer and an integration plan aligned with the business strategy and company goals, and negotiates all aspects of the collaboration with owners and stakeholders.

System integration patterns

After the analysis and consultation stage, a system integrator starts implementing transformation according to the established plan and business processes. System integration may cleanly follow a single pattern, or use a hybrid mix of approaches and techniques. Business tasks and goals, as well as an existing software landscape, define the choice of system integration approach. The main architectural approaches are as follows:

Horizontal integration and Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) architecture

Horizontal integration, often implemented by creating or expanding an organization-wide Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), is used when there is a need to reduce the number of connections between system components, when a business requires extra security and when one system’s unit or software should be replaced by another one with similar features. This method of system integration also calls for data unification so that more systems can utilize the same information communicated over ESB.

Vertical integration

When functionality is the essence, a vertical integration approach is often used. Applications and software modules are grouped into business silos, typically corresponding to the business verticals or functional areas.

This method allows for performing system integration in a shorter time frame compared to other approaches, as it can be applied separately within each functional area, while keeping other silos mainly untouched during the internal integration process.

Star integration

Star integration, also called spaghetti integration, is arguably the oldest approach, and, often, the most hated one by the system architecture purists. Every system is directly connected to any other system it needs to communicate with. This way, all the applications and systems that have to interchange data are directly connected with each other. The hate comes from the fact that, like in a bowl of spaghetti, it is hard to pinpoint and troubleshoot any problem in such infrastructure. Also, each change to an individual system can spawn multiple changes required down the line for each affected system and its interfaces. This method may be more time and cost-consuming. Nevertheless, it allows reusing the functionality of subsystems and adds additional flexibility to the whole system.

System integration in action: technical methods

Beyond choosing an overall architectural approach, a system integrator also relies on a set of concrete technical methods to actually move data and functionality between systems. The most common ones are:

Common data format

Also being one of the older approaches to system integration, this method is not commonly used nowadays for new systems implementation. However, in existing legacy environments it still can be widely adopted.

This approach means that all applications and systems support and can read and write the same data formats – typically plain files – exchanged in a defined workflow order, either directly to and from specified system folders or via extract/upload bulk processes. This approach can be thought of as an old-fashioned way to create APIs. In legacy environments it is quite a common task to have a new piece of software integrated within such an old framework. In such cases, stand-alone extractor, converters and writer applications are implemented as data adapters for the new systems to talk to the old ones.

Integration via shared database

Rather than exchanging files or messages, some systems integrate by writing to and reading from a common shared database, letting a central data store double as the interface between applications. This approach avoids building and maintaining separate data-exchange logic for each connection, since every integrated application reads and writes using the same schema and the same transactional guarantees the database provides. It is often used in legacy environments, where applications were originally designed around a single database, or where near real-time consistency between systems matters more than loose coupling. The trade-off is that all integrated applications become tightly coupled to that database's structure: any schema change has to be coordinated across every dependent system, and the shared database itself can become a single point of failure and a performance bottleneck as the number of connected applications grows.

API integration

API integration connects systems and applications directly through their exposed interfaces, typically REST or SOAP APIs, allowing two or more systems to exchange data and trigger actions in near real time without a shared database or file exchange in between. This method is widely used because most modern software already exposes an API, making it a fast and relatively low-cost way to connect systems that were never designed to work together. It works particularly well for point-to-point integrations between a small number of systems, or as the connective layer between an ESB, a microservices architecture, and third-party or legacy applications. As the number of API connections grows, though, so does the complexity of managing authentication, versioning, rate limits, and error handling across all of them – which is why larger integration programs often combine API integration with an Enterprise Service Bus or an API gateway to keep these connections manageable.

Integration via microservices

Microservices integration breaks a monolithic system down into small, independently deployable services, each responsible for a single business capability and communicating through APIs (typically, REST APIs). This method is often chosen when a business needs to scale specific parts of its systems landscape independently, release updates without redeploying the whole application, and support several teams working on different services in parallel. Because each microservice can be built, tested, and updated in isolation, this approach shortens development cycles significantly, but it also introduces its own complexity: infrastructure management, deployment automation, monitoring, versioning, and security management for dozens or even hundreds of API integration points across the system.

A lot of digital transformation techniques stand behind modern system integration methods. A typical system integrator provides services of:

• management of different vendors
• setting up the priority of system integration activities
• establishing service level agreements (SLAs)
• business processes management
• designing system architecture
• creating single points of access
• data migration
• application integration
• custom software development

Keeping it running smoothly: maintenance and support

Every enterprise-grade business operates with large amounts of data via multiple interfaces and versatile business processes. The price of a single mistake may be too high. Besides, companies constantly develop and face new business challenges. That is why a system integrator often becomes a long-term maintenance and support partner that proactively monitors the whole system, typically provides L2 and L3 levels of support, prevents failures, fixes bugs, implements further improvements, develops new functionality, and ensures overall system performance and reliability.

Benefits for your business

As a result of a proper system integration project, an organization gets many advantages, such as:

• Better managed processes increase customer satisfaction and retention and provide a better customer experience.
• A single integrated solution for all business tasks decreases operational costs.
• Organized and structured data, regardless of its source, reduce information gaps and data conversion problems.
• Increased ROI: using system integration, businesses can extend their legacy systems' life cycle, since – when enhanced with modern integrated solutions – legacy software can continue to function for longer. A company can thereby reduce immediate efforts spent on digital transformation, saving time for preparing a migration plan for stage-by-stage replacement of legacy systems, while also saving resources on the maintenance and support of outdated software.
• Improved communication between both internal departments and external participants.
• Streamlining and automating business processes ensure reduced OPEX.
• System integration helps functionally and technically connect various business silos within an organization without investing in new solutions.
• Properly interconnected systems ensure immediate provision of up-to-date data to all business units, helping to avoid errors related to different departments working on outdated data snapshots, reducing errors related to input data re-entry, and keeping all system components in sync and working with the latest actual information.
• Centralized management – business processes and tasks can be governed from a single point of access/unified UI.
• Improved security and compliance – system integration allows adding extra levels of protection or new rules of operation.
• You get a business-specific solution instead of a generic, run-of-the-mill one, as a system integrator builds a system tailored to the functionality your business, company, and vertical require.
• Budget-saving – system integration may be more cost-effective compared to purchasing or developing new software systems and then implementing a new solution, which would require migrating existing business functionality and features in addition to implementing the newly desired features.
• Time-effective – for the same reason, improving existing software by system integration may be faster than the development of new software with similar functionality from scratch.
• Resource-effective: starting system integration with business and system analysis allows implementing solutions that are more effective for existing business tasks. A business can save on licenses for proprietary software, as well as on staff that is required to maintain outdated hardware and software.
• More flexible and reliable solution: modules, parts and components of the integrated system can be changed and updated one-by-one when needed. The whole business does not rely on a single piece of software.

System integration: business results

System integration, being an organization-wide complex technical project aimed at connecting different services, tools, applications and modules into a unified system that enables execution and governance of multiple business flows, processes and data across the whole organization, can be costly and time-consuming. As an essential part of the general business strategy and planning, it requires effective vendor management, strong project management and coordination, continuous progress tracking and escalation management. In and of itself, this kind of initiative is usually the most resource-consuming process any IT-heavy business takes on. Nonetheless, it's often necessary and even unavoidable in bigger companies with multi-vendor, multi-system infrastructure. Such companies can rarely rely on a single out-of-the-box (OOTB) software solution – it's nearly impossible to have a universal suite covering the needs of technology giants, infrastructure companies, incumbents, enterprises, and even most mid-sized companies. So, almost every business develops a strategy that includes digital transformation and leans on this kind of integration to some extent, one way or another.

SYTOSS is an experienced software development and consulting partner, providing system integration services to industry leaders in Telecom, FinTech, Digital Media, and Publishing – including business and system analysis, data migration, application integration, middleware and enterprise service bus implementation, single-point-of-access implementation, and custom software development. If you're ready to move your business to the next level, we're a reliable IT partner to help you evaluate the right solutions and implement the functionality your specific business tasks require.