With IT products and solutions, integrations are an everyday problem. For an Order-To-Cash and Revenue Management business process solution it is more so. The solution may be able to provide a one-stop-shop, however, different geographies, different customer profiles and the size of your organization may mean that you bring on the much required “Technical Debt” that will make up the ‘Enterprise Architecture’ of your organization around an Order-To-Cash and Revenue Management solution. All that means one thing and that is “INTEGRATIONS”.
Integrations – What all does it impact?
There are many ways to skin the cat for various issues and Integrations is no exception. With our expertise in the domain, what we have found is that Integrations is the number one topic that has a wide-ranging impact on the bottom-line of your business. It controls the following and more:
- Cost of your overall solution
- Timeliness of your deployments – dependencies, certifications, compliance, etc.
- Smoother rollouts of new lines of business, new services, or all that in new geographies
- Adding new providers seamlessly, in different geographies as required,
Think about the Top-5 or Top-10 issues/concerns for your organization and the IT enterprise architecture. For most of your concerns/issues, we bet that you will be able to map Integrations to be the number one reason for those issues/concerns. Therein lies the tip – treat Integrations as its own issue/concern. It will then get the desired attention.
The common queries
For any integrations, there are a common set of queries:
- Providers – details about one or more provider for each functional area.
- Technology – details about how the integrations would work (queue, API, file-based, synchronous/asynchronous integrations), etc)
- Interfaces – Details about each specific interface and how it would map to your solution.
The ‘Gateway Framework’
The concept of ‘Gateway Framework’ or ‘Gateway architecture’ has been around for quite a while. A right structure around it and ably complimented by the right level of UI/UIX capabilities can address the Integration concerns. At the very minimum, it can significantly reduce the negative impact that it may currently have on your business.
Once you have the Integrations framework in place, it defines the standards, the governing principles around which future integrations should fit. For any new integrations, the common queries need to be answered and then the Gateway Framework should do the rest.
Types of integrations
For different business, you can classify the integrations in different ways. It can be up-stream/downstream integrations. It can be by functional or service domain. The bottom line is that each Gateway is based on a common Gateway Architecture/Framework. In the context of Order to Cash and Revenue Management domain, here are some of the common Gateways that you may require for your integrations.
- Tax Gateway – Integrate one or more tax provider in the geographies supported by your business.
- Payment Gateway – Integrate one or more payment providers in the geographies supported by your business and for the payment methods supported in those geographies
- Finance Gateway – Integrate one or more ERP solution provider for revenue, accounting, or Accounting Book closure life cycle.
- CRM Gateway – Integrate a Point-Of-Sale, eCommerce, or CRM application (third party or home grown) for all your Onboarding needs of your customers, partners, resellers, sales agents, etc.
- Provisioning Gateway – Integrate your order execution for provisioning and or service fulfillment needs to one or more products, network elements, etc.
- Mediation/Usage Gateway – Receive one or more feeds from IoT Devices, network elements, your own products for all the mediation and usage processing needs.
- Data Gateway – For all your data warehousing, BI needs.
How Embrix can help
Embrix has defined a common framework for the Gateway Architecture and all the Gateways are architected, designed, and governed around the same framework. The Embrix Gateway framework is ably complimented by UI/UIX capabilities that manage your integrations and provide you with ZERO-CODE (almost ZERO) integrations. This enables even the Embrix resellers and partners to configure the integrations without having to do any code.
To know how Embrix Gateway framework and Gateways can help address your Integration needs, reach out to us to see how Embrix can help address those concerns. Schedule a Demo with Embrix.