System integration has become increasingly important for organisations, to enhance efficiencies and improve customer experience. However, ensuring seamless integration can prove challenging behind the scenes. Ovations Group is gearing up to help customers overcome their integration challenges with more advanced integration solutions and expert support.
This is according to Dudu Matuwe, Advanced Integration Solutions Lead at Ovations Group, who says: “System integration is critically important in modern organisations because businesses today rely on a complex ecosystem of software, hardware and cloud-based services. Without integration, these systems would remain siloed, leading to inefficiencies, data duplication, poor decision-making and bad customer experience.”
She cites the example of online banking: “When you load your internet banking, you see your home loan, your vehicle account, your checking account all on one screen. But in the background, it's being pulled from multiple systems. In the past, this required a ‘spaghetti’ of connectivity in the background. Advanced integration simplifies what’s happening in the background to make systems talk to other systems automatically, securely and efficiently,” she says.
Matuwe elaborates: “Advanced Integration refers to the process of bringing together different computing systems, software applications and hardware components to function as a co-ordinated whole. The goal is to ensure that these separate systems work together seamlessly to improve efficiency, streamline processes and enable data sharing across platforms.”
Matuwe says new integration solutions overcome some of the key integration challenges organisations face today, including integrating legacy and newer systems without making too many changes on systems. Advanced integration also addresses the challenges associated with different message formats and allows data to be exchanged through different protocols (HTTP or file movement).
“Different systems may use incompatible data formats, protocols or architectures, legacy systems often don’t support modern integration standards like APIs, and different departments may store redundant or conflicting data in isolated systems,” she says.
API-first and microservices-based architecture help address these issues, she says. “More advanced approaches encourage building integrations around modular, re-usable APIs, allow for multiple systems to connect and use the data and support real-time data processing and event-driven integration. Advanced integration enables systems to respond in real-time to actions – for example, a user purchase triggers inventory update. Data transformation and mapping tools can handle data translation between different formats – for example, XML → JSON, CSV → SQL, and they also support data cleansing, enrichment and validation,” Matuwe says.
Matuwe highlights key features of advanced integration tools, such as low-code/no-code integration capabilities and drag-and-drop interfaces or visual workflows for non-developers, which speed up development and reduce the need for specialised programming skills. Pre-built connectors and integration templates with ready-to-use connectors for popular apps also reduce time and cost for deployment, she says.
“Governance and role-based access control is also important, as it defines who can access, modify or deploy integrations, supports auditability and accountability, and reduces risk and ensures compliance with internal policies,” Matuwe notes.
Among the tools Ovations Group uses to address integration challenges is IBM’s webMethods API Management platform and its Control Plane centralised management and governance interface. “It’s my new toy,” Matuwe says. “It addresses situations where data is difficult to trace. Control Plane will trace the request from the source system until wherever you pull in the data and send it back. So, business will use a control plane for full visibility of the transaction and any point of failure.”
As an IBM partner, Ovations Group is now focused on offering solutions such as Control Plane locally.
Matuwe adds that Ovations Group also helps customers across Africa address integration challenges with solutions such as IBM Aspera, which provides high-speed, secure and reliable data transport solutions, enabling organisations to transfer large files and datasets across vast distances and through hybrid cloud environments.
“In banks, using legacy systems and storing payments on a file to be processed later in the day, there can be challenges where one system says it has sent the files and destination says it never received them, and there’s no accountability in the middle,” she says. “Aspera resolves that issue where when the source sends a message, Aspera will guarantee that the destination will receive a response.”
Other key solutions Matuwe’s team harnesses include the IBM DataPower security and integration gateway to protect, secure and accelerate enterprise data traffic; IBM API gateway – designed to securely expose data and business applications wherever they are; IBM App Connect Enterprise (ACE) to connect applications and data across various business environments; and IBM MQ – an enterprise-grade messaging and middleware product that allows applications, systems and services to reliably exchange data by sending and receiving messages via queues.
Matuwe says Ovations is committed to helping customers in South Africa and across Africa enhance operations and customer experience with its advanced systems integration capabilities. “We build relationships with clients to first understand their issues. We then recommend and implement the tools most appropriate to help address integration challenges and help them improve their business,” she concludes.
At Ovations, we believe transformation is a journey, not a destination. Discover how our expertise and partnerships can help your business thrive. Visit OvationsGroup.com to explore our solutions and start the conversation.
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