Bringing Disparate Systems Into Alignment, One Customer At A Time
Corporate acquisitions are often exciting times for shareholders, but they can strike fear and dread in the IT departments of both sides, especially when the full scope of the IT integration effort becomes clear, long after the ink dried on the merger.
The reality is, despite usually being in the same business or industry, the IT stack of corporations that are merging are typically not designed to make this process possible, much less easy. Although “linked data” technologies make this problem solvable, to date a way to operationalize the systematic alignment of disparate IT systems has been elusive.
Enter Unify!. Unify! has a process by which diverse systems of record are brought into alignment and kept in sync by a very well-defined, unidirectional flow of novelty and truth propagation managed by Synchronicity. The approach is so generalized it almost doesn’t matter whether the system was developed in-house, or by someone else.
By making “interoperability” an architectural concern instead of a system-to-system data exchange problem, great efficiencies are gained in the process of making any one system of record cooperate in the transparent data sharing scheme of Unify!.
Because Unify! is technically domain-neutral, highly tolerant of differences in schema and business rules between systems, and offers a framework for developing domain adapters as specialized microservices that participate in Unify!’s truth detection and propagation process through Synchronicity, the task of bringing any one system online is a matter of tapping into the expertise of the developers who built it.
Because there is a single source of truth against which each system is brought into alignment, the task of handling messages is radically simplified. Having a coherent set of tools, techniques and methods, powered by enterprise class distributed software components found in Unify! makes the M&A challenge a lot more manageable.
Challenges
- Systems built by different IT shops are typically not designed with merging into different technology stacks in mind.
- Bringing data from disparate enterprises into alignment requires a single source of truth that can act the formal system of record, but this is notoriously hard to build from scratch when you have control of the systems of record, much less when they came from companies acquired recently.
- What is needed is a coherent set of tools, techniques and methods, powered by a new architecture that deals with most of the orthogonal concerns related to big data and interoperability so that alignment of disparate systems of record, regardless of origin, can be managed in a way that lends itself to reasoning about shared domain identities at any point in time.
Take Aways
- Treating interoperability and data alignment as an architectural concern, bringing any one system of record online to a single source of truth is a vastly simpler problem than traditional integration methods.
- Unify! provides eventual alignment of all systems participating in identity management, meaning the data doesn’t have to be perfect to be useful and very often being able to see discrepancies and errors is half the problem in M&A scenarios.
- When the focus is on shared entities, such as customers, instead of on the particulars of each database, it’s much easier to know how much actual progress is being made when disparate IT shops are challenged to begin operating as one. Unify! makes this process as straightforward as possible, and offers audit trails of the process that ensure provable convergence when the process is complete.
Interested?
If this use case, or something similar, interests you, please feel free to let us know about it! Be sure to contact us so we can better understand your need and help you evaluate our technologies effectively.