A friend of mine owns an old home in uptown. It is a beautiful old home with a gorgeous brick exterior and lots of custom oak and woodwork on the inside. The stairs have a nice curve as they wind their way upstairs and the doors have old-world hardware and lovely old hinges that squeak a little when you open and close them. However, not everything is beautiful.  It’s an old house and old houses have their issues. The windows are wood and leak air which is especially noticeable on chilly winter days. The garage is detached from the house because it used to be a smelly stable for horses. There is radiator heat and no central air and most of all, the pipes rattle. What’s worse is the plumbing is very fragile meaning that if a pipe gets clogged you can’t have a plumber hook up the industrial air-compressed snake to clean your drain or he’ll blow it out and you’ll have an even bigger problem on your hands.

So he has been living with the rattling pipes for many years, until this year. This year is different because this year, he is going to replace most of his plaster walls, which have been crumbling, with drywall.  This project requires him to rip out most of the plaster walls in his house, thereby exposing the aging, rattling pipes. Would you like to guess what other project he will be tackling once all the pipes are exposed? You got it… he is going to update most of the plumbing in his house as part of this larger home improvement project.

Now think about your IT infrastructure.  You have some old legacy systems and applications.  Maybe you even have a good old AS/400 running in your environment. Chances are your ERP and some other core systems are quite old and the way you have your applications integrated is a patchwork of ETL’s, API’s and file drops. My friend’s pipes carry water, yours carry Data. Your Data Pipes rattle and are fragile, much like my friend’s pipes, but you put up with it for now.

Then it happens. You decide you’ve had enough with your old ERP or AS/400 and it’s time to modernize your core apps. Perhaps you decide to put in a PIM system, an MDM, or a Data Warehouse… all of which will require you to overhaul many of your integrations. This is the equivalent of ripping out all the plaster walls in the house, thus exposing your rattling pipes. In your case, your “data pipes” or your integration layer.

If this describes your situation as you enter 2024, you need to seriously consider modernizing the way you have done integrations in the past and implement an Integration Platform, sometimes called Integration Platform as a Service, or iPaaS.

At C2/Xerox we work with some of the top-tier iPaaS vendors such as Boomi, MuleSoft, and Microsoft Azure Data Factory and Data Fabric. If you’re looking at a large IT project that will require you to either break apart or create new integrations (or both) then get in contact with the Data Solutions Team at C2.

If you’re looking to discuss whether iPaaS solutions will help modernize your Integration Layer, C2 specialists can assist. Reach out today. We’re ready to help.