INTEGRATION
FRAGMENTED IT-INFRASTRUCTURES
Digitalization is one of the central opportunities and challenges for today’s companies. On the one hand, the opportunities are characterized by more efficient work processes. The challenges, on the other hand, lie – amongst others – in a highly fragmented IT infrastructure, which can be found in most companies. Many individual solutions are used, which are separated from each other. IT infrastructures generally consist of a pool of individual solutions that are operated independently of each other. Almost every business unit works with its own software and its own connected systems. Thus, the integration of different data sources is usually very difficult, time-consuming and expensive. Therefore, this is rarely being done to the necessary extent.
As a result, most of the data companies collect during their business operations, which would add value to any company in its entirety, cannot be used for every standard software solution. It is a fact that bidirectional access to different data sources within a company – and often across company boundaries – is unavoidable when analog processes are being digitalized. Until now, companies had been forced to develop a new application for almost every process they intended to digitalize. This requires several interfaces, so that data can be used across all platforms. This also means that for each new application, connectors for the data access and for the integration of the individual data supplying systems must be developed from scratch. Unfortunately, this entails a lot of effort and high costs.
A STANDARD IS NEEDED
Companies have to unbundle and standardize their grown IT systems and isolated solutions. The goal should be to combine different IT systems, existing interfaces and applications physically and functionally. By connecting internal solutions, companies benefit from perfectly harmonized systems that communicate perfectly with each other. In turn, this leads to a reduction of complexity.
THE PROBLEMS AT A GLANCE
HOW THESE PROBLEMS CAN BE SOLVED
ALL SYSTEMS, ONE PLATFORM
A business and IoT application often gets its added value only by the use of data from integrated systems. The direct visualization in an application allows processes to be designed more efficiently. Redundancies are being avoided. To get access to external data with an application, it needs to be able to communicate with the existing backend systems. We provide this integration between application and data source with the low-code platform Simplifier by using standardized connectors and state-of-the-art interface technologies.
FAST DATA ACCESS DUE TO STANDARDIZED CONNECTORS
Connectors ensure that access to any data from various systems is possible. The way it works is the exact same for each. In this context, the connector itself can be compared with a data pipeline, so-called the data access method. This exactly describes what system and protocol is to be used. With the help of connector calls, the specified systems can be accessed in a defined manner. The advantage of this is that applications can use the information they need bundled from several different systems. Once created, sending e-mails from the application is just as easy as executing a SOAP request or requesting machine data.
With the Simplifier, many different connectors have already been developed to connect data sources from several clients. The existing connectors can roughly be grouped into two categories. On the one hand, there are “external” connectors that are used to connect customer systems. On the other hand, there are “internal” connectors. They are related to the Simplifier itself.
EXTERNAL CONNECTORS
INTERNAL CONNECTORS
Learn more about creating connectors with the Simplifier
How to create a…