It’s an exciting advance for businesses, but it’s a term that can be quite difficult to understand properly. But whether you understand the concept or not, a Hybrid Integration Platform could be your route to doing business more efficiently, more cost-effectively, and with greater agility. Before we start looking at advantages, let’s clarify what hybrid integration platforms are with a simple explanation.
Your business almost certainly uses a wide range of applications and data, both on-premises and in the cloud, to get its daily tasks done. But without a hybrid integration platform, each application works independently. It’s not the best way to get things done.
As a simple example, think of all the many ways a customer might contact your company. How many applications would sales agents have to monitor? Wouldn’t it be better if everything was in one place? But to achieve that, all the possible applications would have to “talk” to a single platform. Getting them to do so would be a simple form of integration.
But your company does much more than just talk to its customers. Every day, you’re gathering data across a wide range of applications, and they aren’t all located in one place. Some of them may be old but serviceable and on-premises. Others represent newer technology and are in the cloud. Some of them are rarely even used. Just gathering data from all these systems can become a massive task if they aren’t unified in some way. That’s just one of the things a hybrid integration platform achieves. Now for those benefits!
1. Have Everything in One Place
Because a hybrid integration platform unifies all your applications, software and IT systems, you can manage and analyze data from every corner of your enterprise in one place. You don’t have to worry about errors, and it’s easy to share selected data with specific individuals or groups both inside and outside your enterprise.
2. Grow Your Capacity
Thanks to your unifying platform, you can now integrate all manner of devices and all kinds of software into your system. The HIP can be set to share specific data with internal role-players, but also with customers and partners. Your business communicates better, is more productive, and has a greater capacity to satisfy its clients. As a result, you can grow your capacity, expand into new product ranges, and offer new services much more easily.
3. Innovate Faster
Have you spotted a need that you can fulfil by implementing a few changes in the way your business works? Chances are, you’ll need to adapt your IT systems first, and you might need a developer to do the nuts and bolts work to get it off the ground, test it, and put it to work. That was then, but this is now. With an HIP platform, you make simple changes yourself. You might still need a developer to help you with higher-risk changes and complex ones, but it all happens much faster thanks to your integrated platform. When opportunity knocks, it’s the company that’s fastest that wins the race, and not necessarily the one with the most resources at their disposal.
4. Lower Costs and Reduced Risks
If you’re embarking on digital transformation, and you should be, you’ll be moving a lot of what you do into the cloud. But there’s no point in throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Some things work just fine for now, even if they’re older, on-premises systems.
With the ability to integrate everything into a unit, you can develop a mix of heritage and new systems that’s highly functional and easier to budget for. And the whole integration of all these diverse applications requires only one tool instead of multiple tools each of which comes with a pricetag.
Besides that, you can centralize data management and security instead of working with multiple systems that each need their share of attention to keep secure. Plus, when you need to draw data and have it analyzed, you can set up parameters and leave it to the platform saving you time and helping you to reach conclusions faster.
Getting Started
After reading this, you may be eager to plunge right in. But it’s worth making this decision in a measured way. Think about what you want to achieve with your digital transformation. Consult with experts that want to help you rather than just selling a product and leaving you to fend for yourself. Be open to suggestions that can help you to get even more from implementing a HIP and always keep data security as a high priority. Play your cards right, and it won’t be long before you’re enjoying all the benefits we’ve discussed plus more!
