Data Integration Costs Pulling You Down? Try ZIO

Data integration is the process of bringing together data from enterprise applications on the same page to offer a single, unified view. Data integration is the first step towards providing actionable insights for businesses.

There are multiple options available through which one can achieve data integration:

1. You can do custom-coding to bring about data integration from various sources
2. You can make use of an open-source tool to perform data-integration
3. You can buy off-the-shelf software solutions that help you with data integration

How do you choose the right option?  

The most important criteria would be the costs involved in these solutions. There are direct costs, and then there are indirect costs in all of these solutions. 

 Let us look at the costs involved in each of these options and make an informed decision.

Custom coding for data integration  

Resource cost is a significant barrier when you look at custom coding. We are looking at programmers, architects, engineers, program managers, testers, and automation experts. We are talking about an average salary of anywhere between $100,000 to $180,000 for different resources.  

All of these resources would be full-time employees whom you may need to have for a substantial amount of time, usually running into months or years.  

The hidden costs include several iterations for you to reach the ideal stage of data integration. We are already talking about many months or years before you start to see the benefits of data integration. There is a massive opportunity cost involved in this, as you may losing substantially on the insights that your business should be looking at. 

The most overlooked cost is the understanding of the business objectives of data integration by your IT teams. These include insufficient scoping, missed scenarios, and non-functional needs like scalability, reliability, and accessibility. They add to the costs.  

How are you going to manage ongoing maintenance and support of the custom solution? How do you staff them? These could range from minor changes to changes in workflow or business processes themselves. It is tough to assess them, and they add to the costs.  

Leveraging open-source tools for data integration 

This option requires a tremendous amount of skill to use open-source tools. Except for the tool, everything else is going to cost you, right from people who can configure and customize, map it to your business processes or workflow, test, and roll out.  

They don’t come with ongoing support and maintenance. This cost will have to be built-in as a part of the solution. There isn’t anyone to take up the responsibility of ensuring that the tool functions appropriately. At the same time, new releases may not be tested or documented correctly and may not keep pace with your business objectives.  

Free, open-source tools, despite their advantages, comes with a fair amount of risk that may cost more than you think in the long run.  

Off-the-shelf solution for data integration 

By far, this is the safe bet for enterprises looking at data integration from multiple sources and gaining business insights out of them. However, it would be best if you are aware of various cost elements in this scenario: 

• Licensing costs 
• Support and maintenance costs 
• Professional services costs 
• Costing of additional database connections  
• User-level licensing  
• Customization vs. configuration costs 
• De-duplication possibilities  

Understanding these costs will help you make your decision.   

Going with one of these choices is not going to be easy for enterprises looking at data integration. Each of these options comes with huge costs and efforts.

Is there a solution to this problem?  

We have a solution to this problem, and we call that ZIO.  

ZIO is an innovative, cost-effective, platform-agnostic, language-based Enterprise Data Bus (EDB) solution.   

It combines a low-code approach and strong professional services capability to deliver the lowest Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) to clients.  

It brings all enterprise applications on the same page through seamless and scalable integration of practically unlimited applications on a single unified platform.  

ZIO comprises a suite of data management and analysis tools that enable cloud and on-premise integrations, B2B/EDI management/MDM, IoT/API design and management, and workflow automation. 

Developed around the DataOps concept for automation and orchestration of enterprise data, what ZIO does differently than other solutions is to use a proprietary, language-based approach.  

ZIO can take a holistic view of your enterprise data using its data-processing language, treating complex and disparate systems as a single entity. ZIO takes in your entire computing landscape to get your apps to talk to each other almost natively, which goes far beyond just creating a ‘mashup’ of apps. 

ZIO comes with the following capabilities that help enterprises achieve more with less:

• Unify all your data irrespective of whether your connectivity needs are event-driven, concurrent, batch processing, etc.  
• Overcome silos with true integration across systems, whether internal business units or external systems of customers and partners. 
• Extract more value from your data by enabling real-time and high-quality data exchange between cross-functional applications 
• Eliminate monotonous tasks by automating your data exchange and creating customized workflows  
• Proven solution capabilities that have been tried, tested, and trusted across several small and large enterprises 

ZIO offers all the features that enterprises need for seamless data connectivity across applications without a hefty price tag.  

We have helped several clients get their apps connected with ZIO at a fraction of the cost of other solutions.