What Is Integration as a Service?
TL;DR – Data and applications that are already in the cloud and the ones that hide in on-premise data silos can be brought together into a flexible, scalable environment for any use case, no matter how complex, at speed and scale.
How It Started
In 2004, a couple of days after finishing my undergraduate degree, I stepped into a building in West Omaha with very little knowledge about what I was about to do. A friend of mine, who worked at a portfolio accounting start up, said his firm needed help reconciling data. I was getting married soon and needed a job. Without any fanfare, I showed up for work at Orion Advisor Services and got my very first look at just how important business data can be.
My role was to look over data, tons of it, and make sure that advisors were successful, happy and able to get their jobs done based on the data in our system. It took a lot of time back then and I was perpetually nervous for a long time. I knew that messing up an advisor’s data would have significant consequences – all of which I never wanted to personally face. As I grew in my knowledge and expertise, I realized that helping advisors understand what they could do wasn’t something to fear. It was exciting.
Ultimately, I oversaw marketing and product design because I understood that educating advisors about the possibilities their data contained was the crux of innovation. I had to stay entrenched in the product to explain it well. The feedback I received from advisors in those days informed the design of what I was creating. We were forging fresh paths in the wild west of wealthtech (well before we had tags like ‘fintech’ or ‘wealthtech’).
How It’s Going
The world of wealthtech has certainly matured since I was introduced to it. Even now, we are all standing at the beginning of integrated development. Technology providers know that whoever holds the data, shapes the path to the future, which is one reason why they are unsure of their own path forward. Core use cases have been solved for, but your path, your firm’s processes, your desired user experiences are too unique for each piece of your stack to care about. As a result, your vision of the future is bound up in multiple systems that are helpful, necessary and innovating, but ultimately closed.
What Is Integration as a Service?
Integration as a Service is how you break free from the stranglehold of systems that don’t talk to each other. It’s how you are able to replace one system in your tech stack without breaking all the other systems in the process. It’s how you get real time updates across your entire firm.
Mind the Gap
We launched Milemarker to take on Integration as a Service and place it in a category unto its own to bridge the gap your tech naturally creates. Historically, those gaps have been filled either by you or your team, opening you up to error, slower timelines and more human resources costs.
It’s time to integrate your data and applications that are already in the cloud and the ones that hide in on-premise data silos. Integration as a Service allows you to bring your hybrid, multi-cloud business needs into a flexible, scalable environment for any use case, no matter how complex, at speed and scale.
Get Practical
The question really isn’t if you need integrated data. You already know you do. The question is, how are you going to do it?
Set up a time with me to see if you’re ready to take control of your data and become a Data PoweredTM business today.