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Chris Reddick (president, CEO, and co-founder of Clarity Ventures) and Ron Halversen (vice-president sales and marketing) get together to give an overview of complex integrations. 

Part 1 of a 4-part series 

CHRIS REDDICK: Well, hello and welcome. Today we're going to be talking about integration platforms, and in particular, we're going to be talking about our experience over the last 15 years, working with eCommerce integration platforms. My name is, Chris Reddick, and I'm one of the founding partners at Clarity. I focus really heavily on the technical side of things. And I'm joined by, Ron Halversen, who's also one of our key partners at the company. And Ron, why don't you give a little background on your experience with integration platforms.

RON HALVERSEN: Yeah. That's an interesting one, isn't it? Yeah, I've been here at Clarity for about 10 years, but before that, I worked at multiple companies working on integration projects for about the past 15 years prior. I've literally worked with many, many vendors and worked on integration for 20 years easily.

CHRIS: Needless to say, we're going to be really kind of sharing from a technical background from me, and somewhat business related. And then really, from a business perspective with somewhat technical, from Ron. And we're excited to share what we've seen works, what are some of the pitfalls and challenges with some of the integration projects? And just generally to start with, one of the things we wanted to share first is why folks tend to look for integration platforms and what some of the challenges tend to be? And it's interesting, Ron, because in my personal experience, most of the off the shelf tools that...I mean, they've really been around for decades now in different forms and flavors. They do a really nice job with a certain percentage of the project, but one of the big challenges that I know I've always seen, and I think you've experienced the same thing is, whenever it gets down to integration projects, you've got to get access to some of the different systems that you're integrating. And many times that's the hardest part of the project.

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CHRIS: Having a really nice tool that can do a lot, it's almost like having a blueprint for a house. You can have a great blueprint for a house, which is awesome. Don't get me wrong, it's really powerful. But you also need all the resources and you need folks who can put those different pieces together in the way that the blueprint requires. And so that's been one of the biggest things that I've seen. And the biggest challenges is not just having the right technical tools for an integration that are really powerful, but also having a complete team that can deliver on getting access to the systems, doing it securely, making it robust. And what are your thoughts on this, Ron?

RON: Yeah. Well, I would say probably half of the clients that come in. And again, just as a background, if you don't know who Clarity is, we've been in business for 15 years. We've done over 1300 websites and over 3000 integrations. This is literally what we do. We do dozens of them every month. And about half the integrations that come in are people who have had some kind of, and I'll call it an integration tool. It's usually like a plugin or something that's given them basic-like, "I can send sales orders with a Shopify integegration with QuickBooks, something like that. But as soon as they want to do any customization, they have to come to us. About half of them are ones that have already had some kind of, and I'll just call them a tool or a plugin. And then the other half are ones looking for robust integration and they know it upfront. They know they need a true platform.

What I see the problem is, a lot of times, is they'll get a plugin that automates one piece of their business, one simple workflow like pumping in a sales order. And it might even do the reverse where it'll update the tracking status of that sales order. But then they come along and go, okay, well now I want to do custom quotes or I want to do returns or I want to do warranty repairs. And by the way, is there any way to start, especially with really the pressing personalization, right? For the last couple years, personalization has really being press on to increase marketing conversions. Now as they're getting into personalizations, they come back and go, now that I'm pushing the sales orders to and from QuickBooks, is there any way for me to take all of my clients and customers behavior, like what they're browsing, what they're buying, what they're doing, how many times they logged in and start pumping that up into my eCommerce CRM so I can start getting some sales insight as to their behavior and what they're doing?

And those off the shelf tools don't do any of that. They're coming to us, typically, where we're sitting down and it's more of a consultative approach where it's, what's possible? Most of them don't know what they don't know. And with us, we're literally looking at the technology, assuming we can do everything because that's what we do. Right? And so we literally sit down and talk about, what do you need to drive your business, to change your business, to increase your business? What can the integration do to help automate and improve and drive and accomplish those goals? And we document that first. And then we'll go in technically and figure out how to do that integration. And then that's what we implement. Right? It definitely shows very quickly, I need the ability to build a building, not just have the Legos to stand up a building. It's a lot different when you actually need to construct Legos that don't exist.

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CHRIS: Yeah, that's right. And the reality is that some of these tools are really powerful and that includes the Clarity Connect platform that we've built. They're really powerful. But the thing that we want you to take away is, it's not just the tool. You're also looking for the team that's supporting it. And for many of our clients, they have a really strong internal team that can do most of the work. You may be best looking for a tool that can facilitate and really be the last mile that you need for your internal team that's really capable. For most clients though, that's not the case. And we really want to make sure that you understand what you're getting and what you're not getting with a tool like Clarity Connect and then other integration platforms be they SaaS or On-premise.

And ultimately, there are some really key criteria and capabilities that are important with these tools. We're going to be talking about those today. But the other thing we want to encourage you to keep in mind is, Ron, like you were saying it, we want to go over the overall plan with your team and determine who's going to do what and make sure that you have the resources to be able to accomplish your goals for the project. Many, many, many projects that have a lot of focus on using a particular tool as their solution, they aren't actually utilized in the long run because they don't actually solve the business problems. And they're not able to get across the finish line because they run into issues that they didn't predict. That's why we recommend more of a white glove type of interaction.

And what's great is because of the efficiencies of the process with a tool like Clarity Connect, companies like ours, we're able to offer white glove support as part of our offering that complements the actual tool itself. And so we just encourage you to think about this and think about what your organization and your capabilities are with regards to the different systems that you're integrating. Does your team or do you have vendors that you're working with, have the ability to securely expose the APIs and the endpoints to be able to get access to those systems in the way that your integration tool needs?

And in particular, have you tested and validated that this is all going to work properly and do you have the resources to do that? And then in addition to that, do you have the knowledge about this integration tool that you're going to be using to be able to execute with that a particular tool in the timeframe that you need? Anyway, with that, that's a high level overview of what we're going to be covering on today. And feel free, Ron, if you wanted to go into any other details on the overview here.

RON: Yeah. I think, probably, just a simple one is since we're going to be talking about Connect, let's go ahead and just break it down into the components, because there's really two main components to the Connect platform, at least the way that I see it from a sales perspective if I talk about the platform itself. I'll let you talk about the platform capabilities. And then around the platform we have connectors. And the connectors, I like to refer to them as the little translators, right? If I wanted to connect someone who speaks Japanese to somebody who speaks French, I got to have a translator that speaks one or the other. But it's almost like the Connect platform is the one that can speak every language. And then around the end, is the one that talks to the API that can speak that language for each platform.

So I've got one guy out on the end that can speak French and I've got a gal on the other side that can speak Japanese and then they turn around and take the information and pop it into the middle and then, Clarity Connect, the platform itself is what takes and handles the data transforms, manipulates the data and does all that kind of stuff. We're probably going to be talking in today's discussion about the platform itself and then talking about the connectors. The connectors, as I said, handle the field mappings and handle the translation of the data. Can you talk a little bit about what's included in, quote-unquote, the platform itself?

CHRIS: Yeah, absolutely. The platform itself is very key within the overall context, at least it's very important and that it has certain minimum criteria or capabilities. What you want to look for with any integration platform are queuing capabilities. So having the ability to set up discreet jobs that are queued so that the data is persistent whenever it's going across the wire. And if for whatever reason a system is offline or possibly there's maintenance, there could be an error or some kind of unexpected issue on the receiving end or the sending end of a job. We want to make sure that that job can continue to stay unresolved essentially, and have a dashboard to be able to see the status of this notifications, et cetera, so that basically any task that is required or necessary gets persisted until it completes. And if there are any issues, that information and the detail around it gets shared up to the team through a dashboard notifications, and other forms of self-healing.

 
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CHRIS: In addition to that, we typically are looking for some form of scheduling and periodic schedule on what's commonly referred to as essentially an atomic level or kind of per task that's running. Every type of task or workflow that needs to run, it can be discreetly set for a particular schedule. And the schedule can follow some very advanced rules. It can queue based off of changes to records. Essentially, it can run on demand in real time or it can run on a periodic schedule. Think of a cron job as an example, and be able to run on a very specific schedule. And Ron, and if you want, feel free to share any examples that you might have on that.

RON: Sure. Yeah. I mean, on the queuing one, I loved how you talked about the queuing one. And for me thinking about that, it's like if I had 10 sales orders that came in and I had some kind of network hiccup and I didn't put those sales orders into the ERP configuration for fulfillment and those blow up, I don't want those sales orders gone. I mean, that's literally money straight out of my pocket. The queuing mechanism for Connect can take all those and do reties. It literally moves it into a queue that, as Chris said, is persisted, so it can literally retry until it reconnects or allows you to go fix what that area is and then invoke and trigger the sending of those things as they're in this queue, basically ensuring you don't lose any data. I think that's a huge important one for the queue. And I love that.

The scheduling one, when I typically see my clients use this, a simple example would be, what if in your ERP you've got 700,000 SKUs and you're trying to pull all those products back into the storefront? And that takes, I don't know, let's make it fast 15 minutes to run 700,000 product updates. Well, you're obviously not going to run that in the middle of the day and clog up your whole entire integration. You might want to create unique, independent integration tasks and have all products sync at maybe 2:00 AM every day. On the other hand, if you're customizing pricing or you're changing inventory counts as you're fulfilling throughout the day, you might want to run inventory every 10 minutes. So it says, "Hey, just get my inventory, that's all I need to be on the website." Pricing and inventory has to be really accurate and really fast. The scheduling allows us to create individual integration queries and then schedule them to run at different intervals or they could be called in real time, as well, right?

CHRIS: That's right. That's exactly right. And what you were talking about there with this large amount of data is a great example of where data storage and caching and possibly data manipulation really makes sense. And we'll get into this as we go. But basically, one of the things that you want to look at with your integration platform is, is it going to mechanically be able to deal with large amounts of data and is it going to be intelligent so that it can deal with scenarios where you have a master record, but you have updates coming in from different sources and maybe there are field level master delineation. You could say for a product record, the SKU and the price and the inventory data is coming from an ERP, but the marketing metadata is actually living as a master inside of an eCommerce system.

And so we need to be able to have this powerful kind of delineation between the source of record, if you will, as well as things like when an order goes through a certain status, we need to be able to manage with business logic that is easy to configure and easy to set up within the integration platform. If it's in this status, this is the source of record. The eCommerce is the source of record. When it's a new order, that's a web order, for example. And then once it goes into fulfillment status, now the ERP is the source of record. And so these are just some examples, but does the system you're using have this capability? And so just in general, I would love to hear, Ron, if you have other examples on that as well.

RON: Yeah. The master data management is great. For example, we have this with a lot of clients. Let's say Clarity signs up as one of your customers and Clarity can purchase on account. Now Ron and Chris, are contacts at Clarity. Ron and Chris may be able to log intothe portal's eCom storefront, and they can change my name, my phone number, my email address, etc. But Clarity filled out a contract and the sales rep put that contract and that relationship in the ERP so Ron doesn't have rights to change that. In the master data management model, Ron can edit the fields about his personal contact information, but he can't go in and edit and muck up any of the fields that were set up at the contractual level in the ERP. Like you said, some of the entities source of truth is the configuration in ERP while others live inside the storefront. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. I love that.

CHRIS: Agreed.

Continue to Chapter 2 to learn about the necessary architecture.

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