ESB: detrimental for your company's evolution

Every company’s IT infrastructure receives and processes information from various sources, storing, reproducing and transmitting it. Its life is an evolutionary process: IT infrastructures grow more complex by the day, and take on new functions and processes. Today, we offer you a look into this evolution and insights on how we can help it develop in a more quick and stable manner.

Let’s take an online store business as an example. At the beginning, its IT infrastructure might seem simple, with just a few basic elements. You have your CRM to handle customer service and order processing, your online store on SAP, and integration with Amazon marketplace.

But as your business grows and flourishes, so does your IT ecosystem. You start to add more and more elements to help you manage your operations. First, you integrate a WMS program for easy stock control. Then, you introduce an ERP system to streamline your manufacturing workflow. And just when you think you’ve got it all figured out, you realize you need a PIM to manage your product information.

Before you know it, your ecosystem has multiplied and expanded exponentially, with integrations popping up left and right.

This type of integrations are called star integrations (for the multi-beam structure) or spaghetti integrations (as the systems tend to get tangled up).

While spaghetti integrations can be useful for smaller companies or those without plans for significant expansion or IT transformation, there are some downsides to this approach:

1. For one thing, upgrading any element of the system requires a complete reworking of all the integrations “tied” to it. So if you update your Bitrix, you’ll have to rework all the connections that rely on it.

2. Each integration may have its own way of logging events, which makes it difficult to track down errors or lost data. Plus, integrating new systems requires a significant investment of time and resources, and business analytics can become a nightmare as data is scattered across different sources and formats.

3. Maintenance of a growing IT infrastructure can quickly become a drain on resources, leaving little room for improving performance. It’s like trying to untangle a ball of yarn – the more you pull, the more knots you find.

IT evolution pathway

Just like organisms in the natural world, companies need to adapt and grow in order to survive – and the key to that growth is a powerful central nervous system.

In the world of IT infrastructures, that central nervous system is called the ESB, or enterprise service bus. Once you integrate the ESB layer into your system, everything becomes more efficient and transparent. Instead of scattered integrations, ESBs combine all the key features you need in one place.

So what does an ESB actually do? It:

• Collects information from other systems, both inside and outside your company’s IT infrastructure.
• Converts that data into the right formats for transmission to other systems.
• Enables you to set the rules for how all that data gets routed and converted.

Plus, the ESB keeps a log of all the messages it handles, making it easy to identify errors and correct them quickly.

Your business’ success is linked to its capacity to respond quickly, change, and scale up. So, the horizontal integration with ESB gives organizations an obvious evolutionary advantage.

Let’s assume you’ve decided to join a marketplace. You don’t have to develop dozens or hundreds of point-to-point connections; instead, you just need to create an integration between your ESB layer and the marketplace and establish data paths within the enterprise service bus. The latter is manageable even by non-tech specialists: the ESB interface is simple to use, and the full setup will only take a few hours.

If you have implemented more than three services into your system, plan to scale your business, and need to track data better, it might be time to implement an ESB. To do so, you will need the right tools to monitor your whole IT architecture. AINSYS integration framework syncs data between every tool and platform your IT team employs, helping you get an accurate picture of your software. By implementing AINSYS tools, any IT consultant can ensure they make the right decisions for your organization and keep up with the ever-changing technology landscape.

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