Clean Data Pipes Are Cool in 2023
- By Lachlan Colquhoun
- January 16, 2023
Many organizations are discovering the virtues of efficient data plumbing.
Once they have aggregated and cleaned the data from multiple internal and external sources, and the data swamp has become a lake, the next critical step is to distribute the data smoothly to the users and automated systems.
This spans not just employees in various operational roles but also customers and collaborative partners where appropriate.
This data workflow must link with people, IoT devices, and endpoints. One way of dealing with this is orchestrating events with APIs. So critical has this become that the need for data plumbing is driving a wave of integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) integration solutions, including API management and data preparation.
iPaaS is a technology area that is having a moment right now. One company riding this wave is Boomi, formerly Dell-owned and now under private equity ownership.
The company was sold by Dell in 2021 for USD4 billion, which is partly a testament to its potential as a standalone offering in competition with the likes of MuleSoft.
The Boomi AtomSphere cloud-based integration platform is winning plaudits and is supported by a raft of new case studies.
Self-Service
AtomSphere aggregates data from multiple sources and leverages AI and Natural Language Processing to deliver templates for functional apps that non-technical employees can configure through a self-service interface.
One company which has gone public with its success in using AtomSphere is major Australian energy company Origin, which has more than 4.5 million retail customers and is also an upstream player in the liquified natural gas (LNG) industry.
The company had a familiar problem: data came from disparate platforms and vendor solutions at various stages of maturity.
“The result is that Origin can make better and faster decisions on where to dig, manage its environmental impact, improve its process and speed for getting gas onto ships and supplying energy to its customers”
Integration was done manually and was time-consuming, requiring people to retrieve data when needed, to be manipulated and distributed primarily with spreadsheets.
Since deploying the iPaaS platform, Origin has created 1500 integrations connecting applications across the organization. Integration builds that would have taken up to six weeks previously now take an average of one week.
In addition to delivering time savings of around 80%, all integrations are now managed by one dedicated integration lead while a small group of core data owners manage data exceptions.
The result is that Origin can make better and faster decisions on where to dig, manage its environmental impact, and improve its process and speed for getting gas onto ships and supplying energy to its customers.
Origin is not the only Australian company getting benefits from iPaaS, and Boomi is by no means the only vendor making waves.
Pipe cleaning
Perhaps ironically, Australian plumbing supplies company Reece has been unclogging its data pipes by using SnapLogic to allow the free flow of data.
Reece has been around for 100 years and has relied on a single core system to do everything from payroll to finance, and people experience.
Its IT strategy has been to pick best-of-breed off-the-shelf systems for various operational functionalities and began to move these out into the cloud in tier 1 applications.
The cloud worked well enough, but data was locked in each system's confines. iPaaS is presented as the way to unclog the sprawl of applications, and today Reece is running around 60 different integrations between its various platforms.
The iPaaS implementation has found value in legacy applications while at the same time improving agility and future-proofing infrastructure (at least as much as is possible today).
The company extolls the benefits of the time it saves and the improvements in the data flow to where they are needed to drive the business.
Forrester’s findings
SnapLogic commissioned Forrester to do one of its Total Economic Impact studies. The results are great for the vendor but also point to the broader benefits of iPaaS as a way forward for organizations with disparate and complex legacy systems.
Forrester estimated that organizations implementing SnapLogic could expect USD3.9 million in total benefits while generating another USD1 million in digital transformation revenue streams.
There was a 70% reduction in developer time to building integrations which could result in over USD772,000 in savings while also delivering USD640,000 in maintenance savings from new automated processes.
A total ROI of 498% also presents a fairly compelling case. Not a bad result for cleaning out the pipes.
Lachlan Colquhoun is the Australia and New Zealand correspondent for CDOTrends and the NextGenConnectivity editor. He remains fascinated with how businesses reinvent themselves through digital technology to solve existing issues and change their entire business models. You can reach him at [email protected].
Image credit: iStockphoto/DERO2084