A Comprehensive Guide to Integrating Custom Software into Your Existing Systems

Summary: Building custom software solutions has become a new order for businesses to thrive and grow. However, when it comes to blending custom solutions into their existing IT systems, businesses face numerous roadblocks. This 4-min read will serve as your perfect guide on how to maximize business benefits by plugging in custom software to your existing systems.

Technology has seeped into every business function for modern enterprises. And this shift has resulted in the rapid growth of custom software systems serving crucial functions and leading organizations towards higher efficiencies.

However, as businesses invest in enhancing their tech capabilities with bespoke products, they must take into consideration how those co-exist, function, and fit in with their existing IT infrastructure without causing disruption. The biggest challenge for unintegrated systems becomes collating data across individual software solutions and automating tasks across the operations.

As complex as the process of custom integration is, many businesses craft the best software ideas but fail to reap their benefits because of compatibility issues, poor management, and inefficient planning. In this article, we will delve into the best practices for custom software integration that will help you score maximum with your tailored IT investments.

Let’s dig in.

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But before we get into the complexities of the process, let’s first answer the most basic question:

What is Custom Software Integration?

Companies across all sizes from startups to SMBs are leaning on customized solutions to build deeper competencies, drive higher customer satisfaction, and build wider sources of revenue.

To put it simply, custom software integration is the process of enabling your tailored solutions communicate with your existing systems, collate large volumes of data generated by them, and ultimately drive wiser business decisions. It binds multiple software solutions performing diverse functions for enhancing the overall business operations – integrating all your business data, tools, and apps.

Rapidly growing businesses must use integrated systems to interoperate between different business functions and reduce complicated human interventions to present end users with a centralized solution instead of disparate systems.

Businesses face a range of challenges arising out of complex engineering needs to accommodate bespoke platforms into their existing systems.

In this piece, I'll walk you through the best integration practices for custom software so that you overcome common bottlenecks and can fetch the maximum benefit of your projects. But before making this investment, you must know its practical use cases.

When Should You Consider Integrating Custom Software into Your Existing Systems?

Your integration project must be driven by simple goals – making the existing systems and the custom solution co-exist seamlessly, centralize data access, and break down silos between individual systems so that they do not complicate the operational workflows.

You must steer clear of issues regarding data duplication and inconsistency issues as they eventually end up affecting the bottom line of your business. Down the lines, these issues can spiral out of hand, making your solution redundant, ultimately giving you reasons to go with legacy software modernization.

So, if you are saying yes to most of these pointers mentioned below, you must know its time:

• Your business data is stored in different locations. And in moments of need, you have to surf through multiple interfaces and data formats to get a realistic and holistic view of your business.
• Your resources are tired and frustrated of switching between different business applications for completing a single task. Not only is this affecting their productivity but impacting your employee experience.
• Your business is unable to avoid data inaccuracies from manual processes. Your resources spend a huge chunk of their workhours for feeding information into individual software systems.
• You are spending a lot on maintaining and updating each business application.
• Your tech teams cannot modernize legacy applications or add custom capabilities without disrupting the operations.

If you find yourself saying yes to most of these challenges, you must explore the different kinds of integrations that you can leverage for your business.

Different Types of Custom Software Integrations

Every business has unique integration needs. You need to make a wise choice when choosing the best-fit integration for your custom software to avoid frictions in your operations.

Vertical integration

If you are looking at an integration that works best for interdepartmental systems, then vertical integration is your best bet. Your software development partner would use this to connect an accessible legacy system with newly built software for seamless data access.

Horizontal integration

Horizontal integration is used generally for long-term integrations, although it might seem a costly investment at the start. It is also known as enterprise service bus (ESB) - one that has multiple stopping points, making each subsystem independent in its own way.

Star integration

The star integration is in all ways. Systems in a star integration get different connections that make up a larger cohesive ecosystem. However, the flaw here is the fact that issues in one system would require the business to replace the entire model – which is why it doesn’t make a good long-term solution. But most startups, small and mid-sized businesses opt for the star integration because of its cost effectiveness.

We’ll now help you collate the best practices for custom software integration so that you can build a flawless process.

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Best Practices for Integrating Custom Software

Building integrated custom software calls for taking up a strategic approach because it holds the potential to disrupt the entire operational model of a business. Here are a few fail-proof practices you can leverage:

Don’t Ignore Your MVPs

Custom software integration is a complex process, which means you need to address tons of tech challenges strategically. The best start to your integration project is developing an MVP as it gives you a clear picture of how your solution is delivering value, and how well it is reacting to concerns and user feedback which will help you win stakeholder support for carrying out further enhancements.

Use an Application Integration Platform

If you want to build the competencies of handling multiple customer-facing integrations, you should opt for an app integration solution. From super-efficient drag and drop dev tools to pre-built connectors for both tech and non-tech users help in simplifying integration testing, enhancing time of development and managing the integration landscape overall.

Choose Prebuilt APIs

Application integration tools of course are a great choice, but you’ll get the best benefit of those by integrating a library of prebuilt connectors. Apart from effectively communicating with different application APIs in your environment, they reduce development timelines significantly by streamlining data accessibility and cater to a diverse range of integration requirements.

Take a Modular Approach to Design

When running an integration landscape, you must build easy-to-use design components. Complexity in the MVP architecture doesn’t just delay launch but brings in unnecessary challenges before you get user feedback for your solution. Your goal should be to make a clean, well-documented code structure that leaves room for design enhancements as you add new features in the final product development.

Integrate An Agile Approach to Testing

Your MVP development is a crucial stage which should not integrate extensive error testing of every component as it would delay MVP delivery. At this stage, your focus must be on prioritizing larger errors that pose a threat to your integration landscape. Once the MVP stage has a successful run, you can incorporate advanced error handling along with integrating user feedback.

Worship Security Measures

Software integrations open your entire tech architecture to data vulnerabilities. Although syncing your business software applications is a crucial part of staying ahead in the digital era, you must ensure you incorporate measures that protect your business data. However, you need to balance security needs with development timelines for building the MVP. After that stage, you can integrate the most advanced data security metrics to address the evolving threat landscape.

Go Beyond MVPs When It Comes to Feedback

For your integration to work effectively, you must constantly integrate feedback beyond the MVP stage. Feedback gathering and implementation is the crux of an agile approach. Use of analytics to measure KPIs and identify potential problems opens the door for continuous improvement. You must refine your integration landscape from actual use cases for longer business value.

Your TakeawayUnintegrated systems from off-the-shelf solutions bring a diverse range of challenges as compared to custom solutions tailored to deal with your integration needs. A software partner with comprehensive experience in the integration landscape can help you avoid the complexities of the process and help you build the best strategic blueprint.Our advanced software integration services helps you prioritize the steps into your integration journey, deliver enhancements at par with feedback, and add business value as your business grows.Get in touch with Radixweb to leverage the maximum benefits of custom integrations without disrupting your existing business processes