Businesses need interoperability to create a productive as well as a collaborative ecosystem. Single-vendor solutions provide interoperability but decimate the functional richness & productivity. Multi-vendor solutions prohibit businesses to scale-up the existing interoperability. With the increasing number of applications, services, and data types within their ecosystem, businesses can’t rely on a single vendor solution, and there is no way to foster productivity & collaboration with a multi-vendor setup sans rich integration. While most businesses have realized the need for a rich integration solution, there is still a lot of vagueness around how to choose the right integration solution.
Building a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) is never the appropriate solution
The first response when an enterprise realizes that it needs an integration solution is, “to build it”. Prima facie, it looks like a simple task of connecting a few in-house systems; however, creating an enterprise integration solution is a complex task. It involves the understanding of the architecture of multiple systems, the uniqueness, features, and flaws of these systems, and the challenges in making them successfully work together. An integration solution is also an evolving, dynamic solution that changes every time the integrated systems or the setup in which the systems are integrated change. A poorly designed integration solution can, therefore, introduce more problems than it resolves.
Integration of an enterprise ecosystem shouldn’t be done with a short-sighted vision. An enterprise will always grow in complexity, size, and would need a scalable, time-tested solution instead of simpler MVPs that would necessitate further development and complex maintenance almost immediately.
Comprehensive, best-in-market integration solution might not be within everyone’s budget
While many businesses understand that an MVP is not the best choice, but still choose to settle down with one due to budgetary limitations. A comprehensive, best-in-market integration solution is not within the budget of many small and mid-sized businesses. The cost of an enterprise-class solution sometimes even exceeds the total cost of the systems that are to be integrated.
Look beyond MVP v/s expensive integration solution
OpsHub has recently introduced its free offering – the Community Edition of its flagship integration solution, OpsHub Integration Manager to address the feature as well as cost-related challenges faced by enterprises that plan to settle down with MVPs due to lack of a better choice or budgetary constraint. OpsHub Integration Manager – Community Edition is meant for all small and mid-sized enterprises, irrespective of their industry & verticals, looking to integrate any of the following systems: Azure DevOps, Jira, Micro Focus ALM, Azure DevOps Server (TFS), and ServiceNow. It encompasses all key features of the paid edition and supports comprehensive bidirectional integrations between the supported systems.
Why OpsHub Integration Manager – Community Edition kills the Build v/s Buy conversation
With OpsHub Integration Manager – Community Edition, there is no need for such enterprises to use feature-less integration plug-ins, minimal viable integration product full of bugs, or go beyond their budget to procure a decent integration solution. At zero cost, OpsHub Integration Manager – Community Edition provides the following features:
OpsHub Integration Manager – Community Edition is reliable, consistent, and scalable
An integration solution plays a huge role in keeping all the systems and teams in the ecosystem together – but it runs in the background, has no interaction with people, and shouldn’t require any change in the end-user behavior. Therefore, the integration solution should be reliable, consistent and run successfully without much supervision or monitoring.
The following features in OpsHub Integration Manager – Community Edition make it reliable, consistent, and scalable.
- Flexible architecture: OpsHub Integration Manager – Community Edition has a flexible architecture that supports integration of vast varieties future changes in the supported systems.
- Designed on eventual consistency model: This model ensures that the data between two systems will eventually be in a consistent state without manual interference.
- Robust reliability and recovery mechanism: The robust reliability and recovery mechanism ensures that there is no data loss due to: connection loss, failure, or integration server going down.
- Failure and conflict management: In case of any failure or conflict, OpsHub Integration Manager – Community Edition allows the administrator to easily take corrective actions for all the entities in the failure queue.
Conclusion
There has always been an ongoing debate around building or buying an integration solution. Due to multiple technical and business reasons, already discussed in this blog, building an integration solution is not a great idea for enterprises not specialized in doing this task. But when it comes to buying an integration solution – the cost has always been a deterrent. Due to the constraint of development and cost, many enterprises settle down for sub-standard products that deter their growth. OpsHub Integration Manager – Community Edition comes a solution that addresses challenges that have never been addressed by an MVP, integration plug-in, or free integration software before. Along with rich features, OpsHub Integration Manager – Community Edition also comes with free Community Support.
