Bhushan Bhad Managing Editor
rom scratching stones and igniting the fire, drilling
Frigs, and extracting oil to integrating the binary code and erupting meaningful software systems, humans have come a long way.
Once challenged by the age of supercomputers, there are many tech marvels that are changing the business dynamics of today and opening up new opportunities enabling a flourished tomorrow. This explains a very intricate blessing humans are showered with—Intelligently Creative. While intelligence has been helping human society to look beyond the curve, it is the agile development of technologyoriented systems that utilize binary simulations and uproots solutions that not only facilitate nurturing the business community but also emerge with new technologies for the better.
Referring to the technological marvels, software systems cannot be left unnoticed. Known as the future ahead of the mighty industry resource—oil, data has taken up the throne to be the king. And as widely understood, it is the kingmaker that steals the throne rather than the mighty king, and the same applies to the data that has been grabbing the global spotlight.
But, many systems have been contributing to social development in general and business development in particular. However, the credit stands in the palm of data integration experts and entrepreneurs who are using this
technology development to come up with a solution. These mind-boggling upgrades not only facilitate ease of experience but also encapsulate a large pool of business challenges, integrate data, utilize modern technology, apply human intelligence and strengthen the industry with one of a unique kind data integration system.
Realizing this, we at Insights Success came up with an edition that may drive you into the world of data and astonish you with the innovative approach of Global Techpreneurs who have surprised the data enthusiast. Dive into our latest edition, “World’s 10 Best Data Integration Solution Providers 2022,” and learn the art of unleashing data matrix with the insightful articles opined by our in-house editorial team.
I hope you have an inspiring read.
,,Data will make most people better off, in terms of productivity as well as exercising free will.
Clever Ads cleverads.com
Cyclr cyclr.com
Adrian Knapp
Founder and CEO
Manuel Climent CEO
Aparavi has always endeavored to be the best at what it does –solve problems of and regarding data.
Clever Ads offers a suite of free advertising solutions for SMBs, providing them a fighting chance to grow and compete against bigger players out there.
Datasource Consulting datasourceconsulting.com elastic.io elastic.io
Etlworks etlworks.com
Fraser Davidson CEO Steve Dine
Managing Partner Dr. Kevin J Mobbs
Managing Director
Cyclr is a prominent name among the embedded integration platforms for SaaS.
Datasource Consulting not only remains close to the latest technology and industry trends, but it also helps move the needle with thought leadership in areas such as Business Intelligence in the Cloud, Agile Business Intelligence, Strategic Analytics and Big Data.
elastic.io combines the tools and features necessary to address the complexity of real-world enterprise integration scenarios with an easy-to-use graphical user interface.
Integrated Partner Solutions na-ips.com
Relokia relokia.com
Maksym Sherbinin CEO
Narendra Prasad CEO Maxim Orlovsky CEO
Etlworks was founded in 2016 by Maksym Sherbinin and Artem Avdonin with a focus on user-friendly cloud data integration.
As a division of WTC Communications, ITP has over 120 years of experience in the communications and electronic equipment business.
Relokia is a platform that helps businesses to deal with a wide swath of data issues.
SyncSpider syncspider.com
Norbert Strappler
Founder and CEO
SyncSpider provides a cloud-based multichannel integration tool that helps online retailers to grow revenue.
Toro Cloud torocloud.com
David Brown
Founder and CEO
Toro cloud provides a single platform to seamlessly integrate and automate the workflow of an organization.
One cannot disregard the fact that evolution in technology has throttled humanity's development to a scale where most of the important things in our life—food, healthcare, finance—can be accessed at out fingertips. However, one can also not disregard the flipside of the coin—cybersecurity risks, fraud, data privacy threats.
In the business world, the capability to solve a problem is what gives you an edge, making you stand out from the crowd. When it comes to the problems of those critical aspects of technology, companies across the world strive to demonstrate their expertise in solving them. Such companies encompass the potential to bring about paradigm shifts and carve their own identity.
Among such companies, Aparavi has always endeavored to be the best at what it does – solve problems of and regarding data.
Delivering the Data Intelligence and Automation Platform, Aparavi helps organizations find and unlock the value of data no matter where it lives. Its cloud-based platform finds, automates, governs, and consolidates distributed data.
In the following interview, Adrian Knapp , the Founder and CEO , shares valuable insights about Aparavi's unique offerings, its proficiencies in the world of data, and the blueprints of its future goals.
Following are the highlights of the interview:
Please brief our audience about Aparavi, its USPs, and how it is currently positioned as a leading player in the Data Intelligence and Automation solutions niche.
Every company has too much data! Data is great but only if you keep the data that has value. There is far too much data that shouldn't exist and creates no value but cyber risks and crazy costs. Data storage is NOT cheap as the industry wants you to think. It is super expensive and risky in reality. But I do not expect the creators of the problems to solve it.
Aparavi is the solution to the problem. We help cleaning data, shrink data footprint to the max and get the best value out of it. That is what our data intelligence and automation platform does better than any other tool in the market. With deep intelligence that rapidly discovers duplicates, automatically classifies, and optimizes highly distributed data to mitigate risk, reduce costs and exploit data value, we are the trusted disrupter in the sector.
We optimize secure access for modern data demands of analytics, machine learning, and collaboration, connecting business and IT to transform data into a competitive asset. We augment tons of great existing solutions in the governance, compliance, backup, archive and machine learning and artificial intelligence space. We clean, prepare, and optimize before you ingest into those vertical solutions.
Although we have a single platform, it is utilized for numerous different use cases which we share as solutions ranging from data discovery and clean up, M&A Integrations, cloud data migrations with intelligence, and more, however the vast volume of 'Data Services' provided and delivered by our MSPs who are data experts with indepth experience in customer verticals including financial services, insurance, legal data services, healthcare as well as data services such as tape data discovery and migration.
Adrian, please brief us about your journey in the industry, and how you have contributed towards the company's success.
I have been in the data centric business with different companies for over 20+ years, and continually fascinated by data, how it has evolved, the scale, creation and sharing of data has created both opportunity for innovation acceleration especially in collaboration of minds, organizations, applications and the utilization of AI, machine, and deep learning as well as much complexity, risk, and untapped value. Many organizations are still operating like it is the 1990's. It is fascinating how much the right data at the right time can be both truly revolutionary and a disaster at the same time.
World’s 10 Best Data Integra on Solu on Provides 2022Looking at the data ecosystem of vendors from storage hardware, processing systems, cloud storage and many players making copies of data for high availability, data protection, which unfortunately have no idea of the realworld impact of the data nor its value to the business or potential harm to the business.
Much data integration and analytics vendors have grown especially, but this still focusses on structured data in databases and then integration between applicationcontrolled data such as CRM, ERP, collaboration applications such as Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Slack and others.
Silo upon silo control of data does not help you understand what data you have so you can build efficient life cycle management of the data, mitigate risk, reduce cost, and truly exploit your data for competitive advantage.
I believe there is a much better way starting with augmenting such silos with intelligence and automation and truly transform data utilization versus all the vendors fighting over who has control. That is why I started Aparavi.
What impact has the adoption of modern technologies such as AI and machine learning had on the Data Intelligence and Automation solutions niche and what more could be expected in the future?
Let's break this down, clearly AI, machine learning, deep learning technologies and algorithms are rapidly evolving, however they are only as good as the data that is feeding them. The data must be found, cleaned, and ingested efficiently to ensure optimal trusted results. With trash data in the mix, you slow down the whole operation.
Our platform has several elements of data learning or cognitive capability which we are evolving toward our longer-term vision of data independence from locked down by applications or other systems.
As it pertains to solutions to expect the mind boggles as every time, we discuss with our end user customers and MSPs, new use cases are thought of and in many cases, they have deployed our platform for one challenge and then used for numerous other data management areas.
Taking into consideration the current pandemic, what initial challenges did you face and how did you drive your company to sustain operations while ensuring safety of your employees at the same time?
Aparavi is fairly distributed in the US with team members on the West coast, East Coast and Central so we were already quite used to working remote and collaborating closely over video communication software.
An increase in companywide communication on the company progress, as well as on any pandemic news. The support and leadership from our HR team also kept employees apprised on official news and a number of support programs for personnel shared for all to take advantage of through uncertain times across the globe. It was time to get personal and that we are all in this together and all react differently. The team really huddled together albeit virtually and pushed on.
What would be your advice to budding entrepreneurs who aspire to venture into the Data Integration solutions market?
Frist of all I do not like to give unrequested advice to anybody. Data is the lifeblood of nearly every business today from transactions to analytics, production, and inventory systems and more so the dependency on data availability is mission critical, but not everyone manages their data the same way.
There are tons of misconceptions. I bet many of you have heard 'data is the new oil.' No way! Wrong. Oil is not indefinite – data is. Oil is not created by everybody – data is.
Find your own spot in this market but think about yourself first and go from there. What is bothering you that is based on data? And find a better way doing it. You either want to completely reinvent as Aparavi does, or you can be a
consultant or an integrator. Just do what you think works best for the users based on a problem you saw and solve.
How do you envision scaling Aparavi's operations and offerings in 2021?
I envision nothing for 2021. My thoughts go into 22 and 23. This year we opened up a major office in Munich, Germany and staffed rapidly headed up by Gregor Bieler as CEO of Europe who was the GM at Microsoft Germany. Our routeto-market is also accelerating globally as traditional VARs transform to Managed Service Providers, we offer our software platform so that MSPs can deliver numerous Data Services powered by Aparavi.
This works well with the trusted relationship between the end customer and the MSP with the power of data intelligence and automation of Aparavi to truly know their data and transform their data ecosystem, mitigating risk, reducing runaway costs, and more importantly how to exploit their data for business advantage.
Going on, my focus is on giving our solution into the hands of the businesspeople. IT sets it up – users operate. Think like your smart home. A specialist plans and installs the technology. That is your IT department or your MSP. Then it is on the businesspeople to manage, exploit and optimize data. If legal needs a legal hold they can quarantine potential compromised information/data before they even fire out the hold. All power to the user is where we want to go. Making sure we develop our Platform this way and have appropriate marketing/sales approach will keep us super busy. Operations wise I'm not worried with the team we have.
The internet has evidently changed every aspect of the human life. It has brought the whole world to our screens on a single click – providing an endless repository of information. Moreover, it provides platforms where people spend most of their time connecting, sharing, and learning.
With the ever-increasing number of internet users, digitalization is taking over and transforming everything know to us. In the process, it has brought forth new business platforms too.
Where there are people, there is a business opportunity, and it would be right to call the internet a treasure trove of opportunities. An example of internet empowerment, digital marketing and advertising are the new ways of bringing a business into the spotlight.
A plethora of companies are striving to capture this opportunity and a growing market by delivering cuttingedge services and solutions. One prominent name in that list is Clever Ads , a company that helps clients get the most of their online advertising strategies by improving their Google Ads campaigns with free Google Advertising tools.
In the following interview, Manuel Climent, the CEO , sheds light on the inception of Clever Ads, its offerings, the future of digital advertising, and his vision for the company.
Please brief our audience about Clever Ads, its USPs, and how it is currently positioned as a leading player in the data integration solutions niche.
Clever Ads offers a suite of free advertising solutions for SMBs, providing them a fighting chance to grow and compete against bigger players out there. With Clever Ads, companies can create, optimize, and manage their online advertising strategies all in one place and at no extra cost.
Clever Ads is now positioned as a leading player in the market thanks to its technology. Using Machine Learning and AI algorithms to automate the ad creation and automation processes, we keep the costs of our services lower than other competitors while also offering most of our features at no cost.
Our customers, who are largely SMBs and ecommerce businesses, have a growing need for marketing and advertising actions but can hardly afford to hire an agency or the human resources needed to set and manage the strategies manually.
Clever Ads has been a pioneer using this cost structure and developing the technology needed to offer high-quality advertising services. As we put our extensive advertising knowledge into services that are backed by partnerships with Google, Facebook, and Microsoft right into customer's hands.
Furthermore, partnering and sharing our growth and expansion with the mentioned platforms as well as with other ecommerce-focused sites such as BigCommerce, PrestaShop, and Shopify, we've acquired a deep
Manuel Climent, CEO of Clever Ads, has a physics background and worked for eight years as an engineer in a mul na onal company, specifically as a project manager. He then decided to become an entrepreneur associa ng himself with very leading-edge digital marke ng experts and developers back in 2012 while working in strategy and management.
Together, they realized they could escalate and automate the adver sing crea on and op miza on process, 'pack' it, and sell it. From that me moving forward, Manuel has been very successful in gathering all the insight and input from the market, Google, Facebook, and other industry key players. Understanding how the market is going to evolve and plan accordingly, is how Manuel directs strategies.
understanding of their needs through the customer's perspective. Another key differentiator factor is our brilliant, dynamic, and energetic team of highly qualified young experts.
What other products does Clever Ads offer, and how are these making an impact on the industry and your clients?
Clever Ads, as mentioned before, includes a series of free advertising products including a campaign creator, ads audit, keyword planner, banner creator, ads manager mobile app, and many integrations with platforms like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Google Sheets.
Another product line is Clever ecommerce, which focuses on specific adapted products for ecommerce businesses and includes campaign creation, optimization, and management features.
When we started back in 2012, we were only focusing on Google Ads creation and optimization services powered by our Google Ads Creator product. Now, this product is just a small part of our ecosystem. As we were constantly understanding and interpreting our customer's needs, we've been very fast and agile when answering to those market needs with new products and features.
Our last bid, our Ads Management Mobile App, has been launched as a response to the huge and increasing demand for multiplatform mobile apps which promises to be a big leg of our future. Clever Ads has now become a fully integrated advertising management platform.
Being an experienced leader, share with us your opinion on what impact has the adoption of modern technologies such as AI and machine learning had on the data integration solutions niche and what more could be expected in the future?
It's really interesting to see how the world evolves according to the arising technologies and how they transform the day-to-day life, the reality, and the environment we live in. We've gone from an offline planet to a completely online and digital planet. Technologies come and we adapt, using them to build new things: from businesses to personal relationships.
The computing power technologies have now allowed us to automate many processes. Applied to our case, if you set a machine to learn about advertising campaigns optimization, at first the results will be poor, but as it learns, results will get better and much faster than manual working.
At this moment, all physical stores are entering the virtual world with a fast-growing ecommerce sector. Not that many years ago if you wanted to buy something, you'd go to a store. We're normalizing now, thanks to the technology evolution, that we can go to platforms like Google or Amazon and purchase items there. This is now a natural motion still in adoption, and there's a long way to go, but Clever Ads is doing its part for that development.
When a new technology arises, there's always someone more advanced that tends to become the trendsetter and take the cake. Then over time, governments regulate it and divide it in order to prevent monopolies that normally stop innovation.
Companies such as Google, Facebook, or Amazon, will need to be divided as they don't allow smaller players to enter the market and everyday people don't benefit from that monopoly. With this in mind, at Clever Ads we're moving fast to offer multi-platform services, adding value with a smart budget balancer. This way, we won't depend on these platforms, and we can offer our clients a fair and nonskewed optimization when it comes to their advertising spend. This neutral position is the one we'll work from for a fairer future.
Taking into consideration the current pandemic, what initial challenges did you face and how did you drive Clever Ads to sustain operations while ensuring safety of your employees at the same time?
At Clever Ads, we've followed the stipulated regulations and worked remotely during the pandemic. Previously, we had everything prepared and developed so all our employees could work remotely; we had done some test runs in the past. From an operative standpoint, it wasn't a challenge for us to perform all our operations remotely. Also, our communication with stakeholders has always been carried out this way. The only part that was affected was our personal interaction with fellow team members. We are transitioning back into office life at the moment.
What would be your advice to budding entrepreneurs who aspire to venture into the data integration solutions market?
My advice would be to be very connected with the market and the environment and dedicate a lot of time to deeply know and understand the niche and its needs. Also, it's key to find a very specific niche to operate in; digital marketing has many disciplines, and you can easily lose focus. This was crucial for Clever and its success.
As technology becomes key to the adoption of digitalization and business processes, arenas like iPaaS are quickly gaining momentum. The iPaaS or integration platform as a service is a complex and delicate equation.
Software integration is essential to handle the complexities of modern business systems and to manage niche requirements like hybrid cloud adoption, and such integration requires a personal touch to understand the various complexities associated with the client’s specific business. Furthermore, it also requires tremendous expertise in software development. If done right, software integration can offer a substantial reduction in technological resources to deliver agile software development.
The iPaas arena is often overlooked due to the complexity of its nature among the non-tech-savvy audience. However, this remains one of the most technically challenging spaces in the software development arena.
To provide for this requirement, Cyclr, now a prominent name among the embedded integration platforms for SaaS, came into existence.
In the following interview, Fraser Davidson , CEO, Cyclr, shares with us in detail about the company’s journey in the Embedded iPaaS arena and his outlook on the promising future prospects.
Please brief our audience about Cyclr, its USPs, and how it is currently positioned as a leading player in the data integration solutions niche.
Our focus is on enabling software vendors to meet their users’ integration needs more easily and directly. This is called Embedded iPaaS, and there are very few companies with the purity of focus Cyclr has in this area.
Integrations are commercially critical to software vendors; however, the creation of extensive connectivity options can be a time-consuming task
that can distract from a software vendor’s core product development.
Cyclr has been designed to enable SaaS and software companies to rapidly scale and adapt their native, in-app integrations with a suite of low-code tools.
As a leader in the Embedded iPaaS space, we have developed our solution to substantially reduce the technical resources required by software companies to create, publish, and maintain their integrations.
We have been serving this market for over five years and have garnered substantial experience in the requirements of software vendors in this regard. Through leveraging lowcode technologies, the integration creation process no longer has to be solely a developer’s responsibility, and the organization as a whole can become more agile.
Integration Marketplace simplifies deployment, as well as enables teams to directly push new integrations live without touching their codebase.
What other products/solutions does your company offer, and how are these making an impact on the industry and your clients?
As well as the ability to build integrations with low-code drag and drop tools, Cyclr has gone a step further to enable the publishing of in-app integrations using our white-labelled marketplace tools. The Embedded Integration Marketplace simplifies deployment, as well as enables teams to directly push new integrations live without touching their codebase. This added agility allows software vendors to react to customer requests faster than ever before, without needing to schedule time into their development sprints.
Being an experienced leader, share with us your opinion on what impact has the adoption of modern technologies such as AI and machine learning had on the data integration solutions niche and what more could be expected in the future?
Whilst AI and machine learning are fantastic tools for managing and distilling significance from large data sets, integration is still fundamentally focused on creating reliable and scalable connections between disparate systems. Integrations tend to be relatively bespoke/custom to software vendors and their client requirements and are developed based upon a defined customer need. AI does not yet play a role in integration/automation creation as it still relies heavily on human interpretation of individual clients’ needs.
That being said, there is a clear opportunity for AI/ML in the future to ease the process of creating integrations - although the jury is out whether the process could ever be completely automated. We watch the AI landscape with interest.
It is fair to say that a different angle is that integration is key to feeding these AIs and computer models with data, as well as sending their results to the appropriate system.
Taking into consideration the current pandemic, what initial challenges did you face, and how did you drive your company to sustain operations while ensuring the safety of your employees at the same time?
We were in the privileged position of being a predominantly remote business
prior to the pandemic. As a result, the transition/adjustment was not as great as it could otherwise have been.
The shift of having all (rather than most) meetings on Zoom was relatively smooth. We increased the cadence of our team meetings, and we made sure to have regular team virtual meetups to make sure we could retain some of the cultures we had developed, especially as our team began to grow with new starters joining regularly.
Keeping the team engaged and informed was critical, and we doubled down on our efforts in this area. Team members were encouraged to put their personal needs ahead of those of the business, and we endeavoured to be as responsive and supportive as any employer could be, given the circumstances.
As things have begun to open up more, we are now focused on getting the 50%
of our team that joined during the pandemic to gradually meetup (as and when they are comfortable) to deepen their bonds with their peers. Coming out of the pandemic, we have maintained our policy of flexible working and have allowed employees to self-determine the extent to which they intermingle and venture into our office spaces.
We have adapted our offices to completely ‘hot desk’ environments and have located them closer to stations to enable ease of travel as and when required.
What would be your advice to budding entrepreneurs who aspire to venture into the data integration solutions market?
Don’t underestimate the complexity of the solution you will need to deliver. It is not the day-to-day A <> B integrations that will determine the
success of your business, rather it will be how you handle the edge cases and inevitable complexities that arise when dealing with disparate uses of data and customer requirements. That being said, you still need to be able to make this complexity simple.
All in all, the data integration market is an exciting market going through some substantial transformation. There is ample opportunity for many clever iPaaS companies to co-exist. Go for it!
How do you envision scaling your company’s operations and offerings in the future?
Today we are a predominantly UK based business with 95%+ of the team directly employed here in England. However, our client base is a large majority international. We are inevitably going to begin opening international offices to have local talent on the ground in key markets - both technical and commercial resources.
We will continue to incorporate our client feedback into the innovation and adaptation of our Embedded iPaaS platform functionality. Our product direction is heavily determined by the needs of our customers.
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“One of the things we liked about Cyclr was the fact that it has been built as a native [embedded] iPaaS solution.”
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“Working with Cyclr has been great. From the initial onboarding process, I could pitch it to Josh, the owner, and explain what Cyclr is going to do for us. I love working with you guys, always super helpful, and the support is great.”
The accessibility of data has been compared with the
Tway electricity or water has been made accessible. The use of technology has kept humankind all stconnected in the 21 century. Despite the existing beliefs that we are the ones running technology, it is rather the opposite. In several domains of our lives, from education to the aviation industry, technology is used to transfer data and make its best possible use to our advantage. From Google, YouTube to Email and Siri, the use of technology undeniably entertains an exchange of data in order to establish a connection between user and computer.
Several large businesses and industries took the support of data in order to make decisions during the post-pandemic situation, which led to short- and long-term impacts on their success. It was a reality check for the businesses, which encouraged them to reconsider their use of technology to respond adaptively. Opportunities such as sudden lockdowns and measures of social distancing developed a stronger reliance on data integration. It offered the companies with a hope that it could not only meet the communication requirements of the modern world but also be effective in serving the expected challenges with potential solutions of the upcoming future.
Businesses post COVID-19 era conducted a recovery plan where the priority was to refocus their digital efforts in alignment with customer and employees’ expectations. For instance, a retail store suddenly had to switch to an online market website within three months. Such a transformation would require the retail business to collect data from its other aspects, such as merchandising, customer support, and even suppliers.
The recovery phase was attended to by the support of data integration mechanisms where businesses could improve their operations and bind several dimensions together, such as from billing to the E-commerce journey of customers. It could offer them a level of connectivity to further establish a full picture of their business, identify gaps, recognize barriers and attend to challenges with greater efficiency.
The post COVID-19 era had encouraged businesses to switch to hybrid or remote working models for their employees. As per a survey by Pew Research Centre, approximately 61% of the employees prefer to working from home. The businesses have also been able to perceive an increase in productivity amongst remote workers, based on which they aim to incorporate and sustain remote working models.
When it comes to switching to remote or hybrid working models, companies are concerned about certain aspects such as failure to protect against security risks, the digital divide between employees, or inefficient collaboration towards work. However, companies around the globe have taken the support of public cloud computing technology which has made it possible to allow access to remote working and hybrid working systems while eliminating their primary concerns. There is a strategic shift in the level of investments companies are making toward cloud computing that allows them to offer a secure and consistent experience for their employees.
Businesses that have enabled virtual modes of operating are rethinking the future of technological infrastructure that could support them in seeking a competitive advantage. According to Deloitte Insights, Microsoft has pointed out that two years of growth have taken in two months, with 59% of companies already having switched to cloud initiatives.
While it could be an effortful attempt to completely transform businesses using a cloud computing approach, companies are initiating their steps by taking people, operational tools, and approaches into consideration. They can ignite a cloud-computing business model by developing a change plan that involves renewing existing strategies, training employees, and mitigating the risks of incorporating cloud computing onto its everyday functioning. Around 87% of the IT decision-makers predict that by the year 2025, organizations will have completely transformed to the cloud. Such an infrastructure would process with an enhanced digital resiliency towards upcoming challenges and improved security towards the exchange of data.
Although cloud computing has been a primary response to recovery from the COVID-19 impact, it is yet to bring about a permanent shift into the existence of business working models, further lowering security risks and resulting in improved operational efficiency. It is possible that in the coming times, the business world will be in a better position to engage in smooth workflow, regulatory operations, and organizational interactions regardless of the mode of work that businesses opt for.
The market for Integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) is booming and is expected to grow exponentially in the coming years. This rapidly developing industry offers enterprises an opportunity to increase their agility by integrating new technologies into their existing enterprise architecture.
The demand for iPaaS solutions has been rising in a plethora of industries including healthcare, finance, retail/ecommerce and more. This evidently shows the need for proficient iPaaS solution providers who can cater to the needs of these diverse industries. In our quest to find such companies through this edition, World's 10 Best Data Integration Solution Providers 2021, we came across elastic.io, an industry-first microservices-based hybrid iPaaS platform that empowers IT organizations to accelerate enterprise digital transformation.
In the following interview, Dr Kevin J Mobbs , the Managing Director, sheds light on the company's journey so far, its cutting-edge solutions, and their impact on industry and clients.
Please brief our audience about your company, its USPs, and how it is currently positioned as a leading player in the data integration solutions niche.
elastic.io is an integration service provider platform with headquarters in Germany. We like to think of our product as 'the only low-code iPaaS you'll ever need.' It combines the tools and features necessary to address the complexity of real-world enterprise integration scenarios, with an easy-touse graphical user interface.
A great example of this combination was demonstrated by one of our recent customers, Krombacher brewery: A very
complex piece of integration architecture that enables rapid, event-driven data synchronization between multiple systems of record for 360° customer view was built and maintained by just a few members of the company's IT Team.
Our iPaaS is designed to help IT specialists – both integration experts as well as ad hoc developers – spend less time with data sync, data transformation, and data migration in a variety of scenarios such as API integration, application integration, B2B and IoT integration. In fewer words, we simplify and accelerate creation and management of integrations.
What other solutions does your company offer, and how are these making an impact on the industry and your clients?
In addition to our enterprise suite, we offer the elastic.io integration platform as white label. More and more SaaS vendors have come to realize that nowadays, it's not enough to build a great product. While it's flattering to think that your product is the solution to a client's problem, it is only truly effective when it can exchange data with related software applications.
The real game-changer is the ability of a SaaS solution to fit seamlessly into the IT landscape of potential clients, so that a proper data exchange and synchronization are enabled right from the start. When this happens, value of SaaS offering increases dramatically and SaaS vendors who embed into client ecosystems, experience much lower churn rates.
An elastic.io offering that helps such SaaS vendors get a head start is our software developer kit. This enables any
user to create new integration connectors for their own SaaS offering or any other. Paired with our collection of more generic connectors for SOAP, JDBC, Webhook, or REST API integrations, these free our users to create integrations with almost any modern application or API.
There are of course clients who have no IT-team, or simply no time, to create integrations or connectors. These clients used to be small to mid-sized enterprises. But nowadays, there is a clear trend towards line-of-business responsibility for integrations, meaning that even the units within large multi-nationals, struggle to access and maintain IT resources. For these customers, we have a full-service offering using our Professional Services Team. They can create integration flows or new connectors for clients.
Dr Kevin, please brief us about your journey in the industry, and how you have contributed towards the company's success.
Like many other people my age, I was lucky enough to witness the explosion of personal computing technology that happened in the early 80's. I learned rudimentary basic at school and even though the Sinclair ZX80 had limitations—check out the keyboard and massive 1KB of memory—the logic and discipline of creating small routines was fascinating to me. Likewise, at university where I studied Microbiology, I witnessed the start of
bioinformatics and systems biology while struggling to perform DNA sequence analysis on my own experimental data.
Despite these experiences, I will never be a competent software engineer. What I have learned through my career in biomedical research, biotech product management, and innovation consulting, is to focus on understanding customers and users – their wants, needs, problems, and pain points. If you do a good job on this, I believe the technology stack discussions become much more focused, and the risks of developing irrelevant features reduces.
Being an experienced leader, share with us your opinion on what impact has the adoption of modern technologies such as AI and machine learning had on the data integration solutions niche and what more could be expected in the future?
AI and machine learning are quite hyped terms, but the exponential reduction in cost of computing power has opened the possibility of processing huge data sets. Approaches I observed in other industries, such as combinatorial data analysis and computational chemistry in drug discovery, were akin to the early neural net methods –essentially trial and error at scale.
The state of the art these days seems more refined and is focused not just on the volume data but instead, the variety and dynamism of data sets used. The pharmaceutical companies all have big data initiatives and Data42 at Novartis is a good example that initiative isn't just about collecting the medical research studies and clinical trial data, it's about combining these with valuable contextual information; so that real insights and value can be mined and then applied to multiple use cases and industries.
So, how do companies looking for a competitive edge, access enough data from various sources to derive real value? I believe that integration of both enterprise and external systems is the answer, and making integrations as easy, yet powerful, as possible. Nothing slows AI & ML better than poor data quality, so you need to be sure you can groom and transform data 'on the fly' as it flows.
Our parent company Cogia AG has a set of interesting AIdriven technologies for customer and employee experience management. These approaches combine traditional engagement markers with sentiment analysis of public domain content such as social media.
In this way, linking product data (ERP), customer information (CRM), and HR systems with social media analysis provide companies with awesome insights; enabling them to better understand and protect brand equity, customer engagement, and employee motivation. So, I see integration as key to enabling AI and ML approaches to further bloom.
Taking into consideration the current pandemic, what initial challenges did you face and how did you drive your company to sustain operations while ensuring safety of your employees at the same time?
At the beginning, we had concerns about a few running projects, because the clients were from the sectors that were hit the hardest. Some of those projects were indeed put on a hold or even abandoned at a later point in time. In general, we've observed that companies became more cautious about investments and long-term commitments. But on the other hand, with everyone working from their homes, the need for digitalization of business processes increased dramatically and so did the need for data synchronization.
So, in this respect, the pandemic served, in fact, as a boost for the data integration solutions market. Having a young and largely virtual team, it didn't take us as an organization too long to adjust. I guess, the biggest task was to help maintain team morale, but we learned to do that through more frequent video calls and ensuring everyone had the flexibility they needed in their working environment, to cope with the demands of caring for family and friends through the pandemic. I think the pandemic has helped us all appreciate the important things in life.
What would be your advice to budding entrepreneurs who aspire to venture into the data integration solutions market?
The data integration solutions market is clearly growing now at a faster pace than anticipated. This is not only due to the pandemic forcing companies to accelerate the digital transformation, but also in general due to the rise of SaaS. The replacement of older, server-bound software solutions with more modular, user-friendly, and flexible SaaS solutions means customers need to connect these disparate systems, somehow if they want to become truly data driven.
So, if there is a right time to enter the data integration solutions market – it might be now. However, be aware that many large companies looking to use integration platforms
have considered 'make vs buy' and most choose 'buy'. Developing and maintaining a platform requires a lot of resources to ensure you have either very deep pockets or an innovative niche application. And that brings me to the 'F' word – FOCUS.
Having a small set of deep features that are laser-targeted at specific customer needs is likely to be much more exciting to early adopters, and easier to sell than a broad set of functions or 'performance features.' Maintaining customer focus is much easier said than done, especially when customer visits are more difficult. Nevertheless, do whatever you can to never lose touch with customers – they probably understand your product better than you do!
How do you envision scaling your company's operations and offerings in the future?
The major boost to our scalability is our recent acquisition by Cogia AG. Combining development, operations and marketing resources plus benefiting from the international sales footprint of Cogia and the synergies between our products, will boost our growth. On the technology side, we are following 2 broad paths.
The first is automation, not just for development, testing, and operations but also for users. The second is ease of use – integrations and data transformations are complex, and the integration scenarios are endless – we have built our platform to address this complexity and that sometimes was at the expense of an intuitive user experience. We have a bunch of cool stuff in our backlog, much inspired by our innovative customers and their insights, so watch this space!
"elastic.io enabled us to migrate the existing customer base from one system to Salesforce and Exponea without the need to have a heavy switch over. It was more like a smooth switch because we were able to listen on updates/deletes." –Christian Dröge, Senior Software Architect.
"A modern architecture strategy is based on the API-centric approach for implementing various established and proven principles of enterprise integration patterns. For me, this was one of the reasons why I chose iPaaS." – Anonymous representative of our client from the education sector.
While sailing, the self-affirmation to reach the
W shore takes dedication and discipline. While finding the measures to find a path, we are adhered to rely on a compass. Compassing the way in, it is essential to resurface the sources that help meet the end product.
In the world of advanced technology, analytical platforms are dependent upon organizational agendas. While understanding the complexities of IT systems, industry disruptions, technological trends, and changing markets, it is essential to prioritize the subject.
To solve industrial needs, aid remediation in various instances, and automate the response, AIOps began to facilitate precise and quick process automation across the business model of the IT sector.
The sources that exclusively assist disruptions and market changes in the industrial movement is solved through AIOps that assist in recurring system problem, organizational challenges, and automated processes.
While moving along the longing processes, it is essential to understand the functionalities and critical uses of AIOps: AIOps
AIOps is an industry that employs AI and ML analytics to automate, streamline, and improve IT operations analytics. AIOps tend to enable real-time comprehension of any
underlying issues in IT businesses. Its intelligent analytics capabilities also provide predictive business insight in numerous forms and across various business operations.
AIOps have nourished the increasing complexity of IT systems, the rapid growth of organizational data, and frequent industry upheavals, such as remote work, new technological trends, constantly changing markets, etc.
While understanding the parameters of the industrial revolution, it has been mandated that obtaining various technological tools to make businesses lively has been the primary goal. While considering AIOps to be the game changer for the face of IT operations, it is necessary to understand how it is impacting the business culture.
Below are the highlights:
More corporate enterprises, even SMEs, are using cloudnative architecture to create and deliver apps quickly. However, maintaining security, governance, better and faster incident handling, and server uptime remains an issue. In the process, the cloud-native environments go through various problems such as alerts for operations, complex deployments, complex root cause analysis, manual remediation, and lack of visibility.
AIOps leverages the power of AI and ML to assist in overcoming these difficulties and provide incredibly datadriven and actionable insights to alleviate the pain points associated with a lack of visibility.
It is reliable to automate issue reporting and remediation, depending on your company model. Another advantage is AIOps’ capacity to delve deep into data containers and siloed data units to determine the root causes of issues, such as continuous deployment failures or crashes.
AIOps with highly advanced innovative capabilities play a critical role in digital transformation, digital operation management, and disruption in various businesses and industries.
AI and machine learning are crucial in performance data analysis and uncovering hidden patterns in data. As a result, teams may delve deeper into multiple data containers and obtain actionable insights that are incredibly dependable and not susceptible to data breakdowns caused by siloed data.
Finally, AIOps may identify redundant procedures that can be automated to increase workplace productivity, efficiency, and overall employee happiness.
DevOps’ essence is fast application delivery, which renders it subject to security flaws that are not discovered until the application is fully completed. However, testing each module would slow development and make the overall growth and testing process more difficult.
So AIOps has taken a step forward to resolve!
AIOps can provide continuous data streams for operations such as anomaly detection, causality prediction, pattern recognition, etc. It can also conveniently handle event correlation and root cause analysis to enable better and more accurate testing.
As a result, AIOps is poised to transform the way we know and comprehend deployment, monitoring, and application support in DevOps.
Financial institutions may use AIOps to collect the relevant consumer data to drive more focused marketing and business development efforts. Additionally, previous customer data may be evaluated to produce more accurate projections for revenue growth and market trends.
AI-enabled governance and event monitoring can help AIOps assure improved regulatory compliance and data security. Finally, financial institutions may obtain a framework for integrating and utilizing multiple complicated data sets for blockchain deployment, NFT, and other purposes.
AIOps may improve incident management skills in IT businesses in a variety of ways, including:
• Identifying the precise core causes of various crises and occurrences
• Developing a unified picture of organizational alert data
• Creating, administering, and automating the incident register for the organization
• Assigning duties for incident monitoring and resolution to multiple people
As AIOps include NLP and predictive analytics, they may pave the way for highly coordinated issue management and incident response strategies for enterprises of all sizes and scales.
While understanding an organization’s core values, it is mandatory to get hold of the automation of AIOps for the productivity of the infrastructural complications. In the process of enhancing the overall experience for a positive outcome, it is essential to drive a firm to Artificial Intelligence Operatives cases to develop and maintain the advocacy.
- Prashik BombardeData integration is the fuel of the modern world of AI. The data integration solutions are essential for gaining a holistic perspective on business operations, supply chains, modeling R&D budgets, and many other commercial purposes. Data integration solutions are quickly becoming the need of the hour for all businesses as AI promises major research outbreaks.
For example, in the pharmaceutical sector, AI and machine learning have discovered the main causes of chronic illnesses like cancer, HIV, Alzheimer’s, among others, at a fraction of the cost of human input. Furthermore, the technology has advanced the pace of discoveries in clinical research and a host of other industries.
The data integration solutions also promise tremendous cost-savings, easy-to-use operation handling software, and insights in real-time. One of the companies that are changing the outlook of global data integration solutions is Etlworks .
In the following interview, Maksym Sherbinin , CEO, Etlworks, shares with us in detail about the company’s journey in the data integration space and his outlook on the commercial arena.
Please brief our audience about Etlworks, its USPs, and how it is currently positioned as a leading player in the data integration solutions niche.
Etlworks was founded in 2016 by Maksym Sherbinin and Artem Avdonin with a focus on user-friendly cloud data integration. We developed an MVP in 6 months, went to the market shortly after that, and had three paying customers by the year-end. I used my contacts from the time when I worked as a freelance consulter to score first customers.
Currently, we offer cloud and on-premises data integration software as a service (SaaS) for enterprises of all sizes and verticals. Our typical customer is looking to accelerate its transition to the cloud and needs a fast, reliable, and easy to use solution which works equally well with the data in the cloud and on-premises.
We help with rapid data movements, data collection, and API integration. Etlworks solves fundamental data integration problems: from real-time data streaming and CDC (change data capture) to batch processing billions of rows of data and to work with well-known and custom APIs. We do have the best-in-class customer
support, which is one of our competitive advantages in this crowded market.
What other products does your company offer, and how are these making an impact on the industry and your clients?
We focus on data integration. Our main product is Etlworks Integrator which is a cloud-native data integration platform that works equally well in the cloud and on-premises. We also offer Data Integration Agent, which is our data integration engine repackaged as a headless app installed as a service or Docker container. It typically runs behind the company's firewall and does not require any administration or maintenance.
Etlworks Integrator and Integration Agent can work together, communicating via the REST API. This is our answer to hybrid data integration when companies need to run synchronized data integration workloads on-premises and in the cloud.
Maksym, please brief us about yourself, your journey in the industry, and how you have contributed to the company's success.
I’m a co-founder and CEO of Etlworks. I was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, and moved to the US in 2000. I worked as a developer, freelance consultant, technical lead, chief architect, and VP of engineering for companies such as i2, McKesson, and SCA before cofounding Etlworks in 2016 with my partner Artem.
During my tenure as a freelance consultant, I have created a data integration engine that is currently used by Bank of New Zeeland, Marketo Australia, Cerebral Palsy Association, Asus USA, and many other companies around the globe. Later this engine became a core of the Etlworks Integrator.
As a CEO of Etlworks, I’m responsible for the company’s vision, strategy, and ultimately success. I continue to contribute to the development of our data integration engine. I live in Pittsburgh, PA, with my wife Olena, younger son Andrew, and a six-yearold Golden Retriever Simba. Our older son Artem is a graduate of the US Naval Academy. He currently serves as an officer in the US Navy.
Being an experienced leader, share with us your opinion on the impact the adoption of modern technologies such as AI and machine learning had on the niche of data integration solutions, and what more could be expected in the future?
Modern data integration is on the cutting edge of software engineering craft. To successfully compete, your solution must be super-fast, reliable,
user-friendly, memory and CPU efficient, take advantage of modern parallel architectures, support real-time data integration techniques such as CDC, and much more.
The true adoption of machine learning and AI in our field has been rather slow, which I'm okay with. You got to have basics taken care of first. The one area where we see a potential for AI adoption is intelligent data mapping.
We started a project with a group of CMU students that will [eventually] allow us to offer automatic data mapping (driven by machine learning)
for various vertical domains such as healthcare, finances, manufacturing, marketing, etc. The plan is to integrate it with our platform but also offer it as a paid service to other vendors.
Considering the current pandemic, what initial challenges did you face, and how did you drive your company to sustain operations while ensuring the safety of your employees at the same time?
Just like everyone else, we were initially stunned by the prospects of a
The Etlworks Integrator is a cloud-native data integration platform that works equally well in the cloud and on-premises.
Maksym Sherbinin CEO Etlworks
collapsing economy, friends and family getting sick and overall uncertainty. We have been working from home even before the pandemic, and our entire infrastructure is in the cloud, so our operations were not affected. However, we do have customers in 25 countries, so we were surely affected by what is going on with the global economy.
A small number of our customers reached out to us and asked for deep discounts, which we provided, no questions asked. What happened next was a big surprise. Our revenue has tripled in the following year and a half, and the number of customers grew by 150%. I attribute this to the accelerated migration of the infrastructure, workloads, and data to the cloud.
I think we were (are) in the right place at the right time. The fact that our price is competitive, and our product and support are awesome helps a lot. The fact that our price is competitive, and our product and support are awesome, helps a lot.
What would be your advice to budding entrepreneurs who aspire to venture into the data integration solutions market?
Become (or hire) an actual industry expert, and do not be afraid of competitors. Don't pitch your business as "the same as Informatica but in the cloud and with AI." Your goal is to make your customers happy. Get to the market as soon as possible but don't release a product that doesn't work as advertised. Focus on a few key features/use cases and do them right the first time.
How do you envision scaling your company’s operations and offerings in the future?
We will continue to grow by at least 70% year over year in the next couple of years. The goal is to become so good (and reasonably big) that no one can ignore us. We will do this by investing in the right people and technologies and improving our already superb customer support. We are open to a strategic partnership but raising the capital is not our highest priority. We are profitable and feel comfortable in terms of the cash flow.
“I needed a solution that facilitated streaming database changes in near
real-time to a variety of destinations. It also had to be flexible enough to handle a multitude of curveballs in a straightforward way. After evaluating virtually each of ETLWorks’ competitors, it became increasingly clear that their solution had everything that I needed while maintaining a reasonable price point.”
“Beyond that, their technical support, both during the sales process and the following was unparalleled. They have consistently responded to any inquiry or question with nearly no lag time and have been immensely helpful. In the rare event that I run into a software defect (even if it's not in their software) or require a new feature to accommodate my workflow, it has consistently been delivered in a matter of days (or less).”
“In my experience as a CTO, I've worked with a large number of vendors, and ETLWorks is without a doubt in the top tier. Beyond the phenomenal support, the application itself has worked great, and I couldn't recommend it any more highly.”
– Chris Furlong. CTO, Anduin tech.”
“I honestly feel like I'm working with another developer on my team when I'm speaking to them. Communication is direct and instant; they have been proactive in investigating our setup and adjusting their code to accommodate our scenarios. They added a bunch of features for us and gave us step-by-step directions on how to use undocumented features when I needed to do very advanced stuff.”
“What I love best is when I ask them a question or identify an issue; they are always on my level and understand what I'm talking about. There’s no back and forth or explaining.” – Bryan Meyerovich. Sr. Software Engineer, Sermo.
In this era, where technology is evolving at a pace faster than it was ever imaginable, corporations must adapt to and inculcate new software to their existing setup to enhance their business processes and get quicker outcomes.
The biggest challenge that surfaces while making an addition of a new application to the setup or transitioning to a new application is the moving of data between apps safely, hassle-free, and with optimum security. This is where Relokia comes into the picture.
Relokia is a company based out of Ternopil, Ukraine, that excels in providing a safe, secure, and easy platform for companies to migrate, control, and backup their data on multiple applications.
In the following interview, Maxim Orlovsky, the CEO shares the company’s journey since inception, the challenges they came across, and his vision for scaling Relokia’s operations and offerings in the future.
Please brief our audience about Relokia, its USPs, and how it is currently positioned as a leading player in the data integration solutions niche.
Data means many different things to many different businesses. Today, data is seen as one of the biggest values out there. Relokia is a platform that helps businesses to deal with a wide swath of data issues.
Let’s say your company undergoes a digital transformation, business scaling, or strategy upgrade, and you are quite prone to face
• switching data among business solutions
merging several help desk instances
• importing databases to help desk systems to improve analytics• records exporting and backup from business tools
Relokia’s services cover those and many other business cases automatedly. So, our clients don’t have to be data experts or software engineers to fix their data migration issues.
Quickly building a competitive advantage and efficiently managing a business isn’t that easy in any data-related niche. Thus, our team keeps on improving the quality of the services, gaining customer loyalty, and growing our credibility.
If you check G2 for Cloud Migration Software, our Help Desk Migration Services holds 3rd place. Good results, but we’re striving for higher.
What other products/solutions does Relokia offer, and how are these making an impact on the industry and your clients?
A few years ago, we successfully launched a help desk migration project. It turned out to be a niche solution that deals with record switch, importing, and exporting among help desk software.
Help Desk Migration is a different API-based way to get your business data to nearly any help desk solution from another system, CSV file, or database dump.
The automated migration service brings value to companies that use help desk systems - just check up our G2 profile page for reviews - and vendors too. We have built partnerships with several vendors - to name a few: Zendesk, Help Scout, Freshdesk, Helpdesk, Freshservice, Kayako, Teamwork Desk, and many others.
Developing Help Desk Migration has been quite a journey for us, and we keep improving our features to meet the API changes and customer needs. Relokia’s team got inspired, and we started a couple of new projects that would let us
Developing Help Desk Migration has been quite a journey for us, and we keep improving our features to meet the API changes and customer needs.Maxim Orlovsky CEO Relokia
move data between project management, accounting management, human resource management, and learning management software.
Everyone wants to get what they paid for. With that in mind, we develop our services to meet the nagging problems and real-time data migration needs the business has.
Relokia and the services we offer aim to • show business owners - their data isn’t locked in one system, and they can move it automatedly and securely • improve the way records switch, import, or export between business platforms
What impact on the industry we have? Well, it is twofold: we bring benefits for companies and software vendors.
So, for companies that migrate: They get to a new platform and keep on working without downtimes or long breaks. The old approaches and methods took them weeks to move their records, with our services it is done within hours or a couple of days - depending on the amount of data.
For vendors: We help vendors get more users aboard. Besides, their sales cycles got improved along with
conversion rates. Basically, the faster their clients get on the platform, the more chances that they stay with them. New customers’ implementation and onboarding process are essential for any SaaS product, and Relokia helps speed it up.
Maxim, please brief us about your journey in the industry and how you have contributed to the company’s success.
Relokia started like a small project. In the beginning, there were only three people who had experience in a) the key business areas and b) the data migration industry. So, I am a Product Manager, Yuriy Kril is a Software Developer, and Dima Lazarchuk is a Marketer.
The idea came from the simple observation of the brutal truth: moving data between software costs companies piles of money and time. They have to spend time searching the outsourcing agency or creating a custom app to switch records on their own. Then went a data switch itself and synchronization records that brought downtimes of support service and disappointed customers who waited too long for responses.
But we knew it could go the other way – less costly but more convenient and efficient.
The lots of brainstorming sessions, roadmap building, market research, service core development, customer interviews, functions, mock-ups, brand strategy, and many other things should be planned and done by our small team.
•The technical development and security aspects were on Yuriy Kril.
•The marketing and sales were on Dima Lazarchuk.
•The UX/UI, core strategy and entrepreneur legitimacy were on me.
Each of us has a core focus area, but we took part in every process and suggested ideas. That’s how the team works.
There wasn’t such a thing as an overnight miracle, Relokia’s co-founders went through thick and thin, and now we’re here - running a data service platform. And we gather around us young people who are inspired to reach more and learn more.
Being an experienced leader, share with us your opinion on what impact has the adoption of modern technologies such as AI and machine learning had on the data integration solutions niche and what more could be expected in the future?
The adoption of AI and machine learning in one way or another is inevitable, so businesses better get prepared for that.
In the last five years or so, we’ve heard many concerns about the digital technologies that will abuse personal data. It was kind of creepy that companies could track their movement, collect their credit card numbers, followed by the ads online, addresses, and other information. And companies keep actively applying artificial intelligence to their services, business processes, and decision-making. The question here is what software does with that data. That’s why the GDPR in 2018 and CCPA in 2020 appeared to give internet users control over their personal data and images.
What is the main problem with AI and machine learning in data integration or processing? Well, I think it’s the biased outcomes (e.g., Apple’s credit card algorithm or Amazon’s automated resume screener) that software may provide due to misapplied or misconfigured AI. The algorithms enhance our life, no doubt here. But they might defy straightforward explanations while changing and adapting to the received data.
So, in the nearest future, businesses will need to re-evaluate and analyze their settings to their algorithms, evaluate operational complexity and the impact of the outcomes, and their governance capabilities. And another focus area includes requirements such as
• set up a standard for their transparency • control AI evolving within their company • manage the interaction between AI and humans
Taking into consideration the current pandemic, what initial challenges did you face and how did you drive Relokia to sustain operations while ensuring the safety of your employees at the same time?
Pandemic became a brand-new challenge for the company. It turned our work, routines, and world perception upside down. There was no playbook on how to deal with it and how to manage your business. So once the lockdown was lifted, we switched to work from home.
Our policies allowed employees to work remotely for a certain period from home, so the workflow and security aspects were appropriately covered. No one knew how long the pandemic would last and how social distancing impacted team engagement and performance. Many of us found ourselves working longer from home than it was from the office. So, our challenges were:
Overtime brings less value in the long run. That’s why we have a few meets on time management. And try to share the best performing tips on planning a workday from home.
Team motivation means a lot for business and employee success. We introduced an online round table once a week for small talk and run retrospective meetings biweekly.
Attention to health at this uncertain time is of urgent importance. Remote fitness challenge becomes a good solution. It was simple: Google sheet with employees who took part in exercises and points one earned during a month. Employees would do exercise and track their points. And, yes, we had a small money remuneration for a winner. It performed great.
When our location entered the green zone and working from the office was allowed, we switched to a hybrid schedule. Those who got bored at home could go to the office, and others could work from home further.
Jani Timonen – “Service which Relokia provides - data migration from one helpdesk to another - was a lifesaver for us! We had a very extended ticket base and a very old and exotic helpdesk - old standalone Kayako. Relokia team has managed to seamlessly migrate our tickets and customers allowing us to move forward with our helpdesk evolution but also keep a track of a history of our interactions. Relokia's expertise is much wider than just a migration. We receive plenty of valuable inputs and advice. The team is very professional, proactive, customer-oriented, and skillful. Wholeheartedly recommend for any projects within your helpdesk!”
Brian Williams – “I hate migrations. So many unexpected twists and turns. Hiccups you didn't expect. This was not my first rodeo. Before starting the migration, I asked how long it would take to migrate and the estimate was 4hrs. Well, that proved to be not accurate at all. After starting it at night and thinking I would wake up to a completed migration. Far from it. Thanks to Kristina being on chat I was able to get updates (beyond the thermometer display) which put me at ease. And, when in the middle of the process we hit an error, she was there (with the dev team) to fix the issue and get me back on track. Having that feeling that someone has my back was priceless. Highly Recommend.”
Rose Gillian – “Great resource – we migrated 13,000 Zendesk tickets into JSM. The data was perfect and saved us a ton of time and energy. Getting the attachments and all the comments were key and this product was delivered. The support team is excellent and while we had a slight issue, they were on it, and we had no data loss. Highly recommend and the price is hard to beat.”
The sanitizer, disposable masks, social distancing, cleaning, and appropriate ventilation system were implemented and improved in our office. Also, we practice as much work from home as possible. That’s a basic thing we adopted once the first COVID-19 case was confirmed in Ukraine.
What would be your advice to budding entrepreneurs who aspire to venture into the data integration solutions market?
Everyone wants to know what the secret to a successful business venture is. And those who succeeded have their own answers that vary heavily. I can share some treatment options, but you should look for a cure yourself.
My to-go tips for budding entrepreneurs are the following: Be courageous to fail. Try as many times as you need. Build a product that solves real business problems, not only the buyer persona’s assumptions.
Be in the know and track the industry trends. How do you envision scaling your company’s operations and offerings in the future?
Relokia keeps evolving, and we plan to improve our switch, import, and export service capabilities within project management, accounting management, human resource management, and learning management software. That’s a lot of work to do, but our team is ready to take on these challenges.
A couple of decades ago, when the digitalization process was taking baby steps, an entirely new sector was evolving simultaneously – e-commerce. Who would have thought that e-commerce would be the new normal in the retail sector? But e-commerce evolved from being just a mere new idea to an industry that is dominating the world today.
Within a few years, this e-commerce sector overlapped traditional marketing, indicating where the retail sector's future lies. In 2007, ecommerce had accounted for 5.1% of online retail sales and raised to 16% till 2019.
The widespread use of online platforms such as Amazon or eBay resulted in substantial growth in the online retail sector. But with the course of time, it became difficult to manage the businesses online, as they didn't want to spend their valuable time and money on repetitive tasks. This created the necessity for software that will manage and optimize the e-commerce business efficiently.
Looking to fill this gap, a company was established – SyncSpider . SyncSpider provides a cloud-based multichannel integration tool that helps online retailers to grow revenue.
In an interview with Insights Success, Norbert Strappler, the Founder and
CEO of SyncSpider, shared his company's journey, its experiences, and future perspectives in the online business sector.
Please brief our audience about SyncSpider, its USPs, and its position as a leading player in the data integration solutions niche.
SyncSpider is an application-to-application integration tool designed to help eCommerce businesses grow revenue using multichannel sales automation. Practically, it helps manage stock in a centralized place, connect with eCommerce tools to sync data, and ultimately create an improved buying experience for customers.
Our mission is to help e-commerce businesses achieve exponential growth. Nowadays, every e-commerce business relies on using a set of complementary marketing apps to better study analytics, interpret data, and create a flawless customer experience. This conventional approach can sometimes be inefficient, time-consuming, and fruitless. E-commerce businesses are losing copious hours on repetitive tasks and manual data synchronization between multiple platforms.
Running a successful business online demands keeping in touch with the latest technological advancements such as data integration solutions. Well, SyncSpider fits them all into one place.
It lets you connect your favourite e-commerce apps to work in sync and build your ideal workflow. No more time and resources are lost on synchronizing never-ending data between multiple platforms.
Today, we pride ourselves in building a rock-solid platform that helps thousands of e-commerce owners earn more by doing less. Or, in our words: work it smarter, sync it better, ship it faster, sell it stronger.
What other products/solutions does SyncSpider offer, and how are these making an impact on the industry and your clients?
Simply put, SyncSpider operates like a centralized nervous system. We help ecommerce businesses integrate and synchronize their favourite tech stack into one platform. Once you connect your favourite apps together, SyncSpider automates the transfer of data and execution of repetitive tasks so you can focus on conquering new marketplaces and winning customers.
Essentially, SyncSpider is an ideal platform for medium to large size webshops and e-commerce agencies that are managing a lot of clients. Our recent study showed that some of our agency partners have seen up to 80 hours a week saved with the automation and workflows they've set up for their clients.
The founder and CEO of SyncSpider is Norbert Strappler. Norbert has been in the ecommerce industry for almost 17 years. An ambitious entrepreneur at heart, he has launched several companies in the digital marketing realm. At the present time, he's also the active founder of Monobunt and DragDropr.
Since a young age, Norbert has always been ecstatic about the future of eCommerce. His enthusiasm and passion for an online world without borders motivated him to launch Monobunt ‒ a pioneer and one of Austria's most successful e-commerce agencies that builds and launches plenty of webshops in a year.
Working with hundreds of e-commerce clients in a dozen years, Norbert and his team became masters at their craft. Apart from being involved in the daily operations of his agency, Norbert is a regular speaker and guest at e-commerce conferences, workshops, and forums. The dynamic nature of his profession led Norbert to establish and maintain long-lasting relationships with various entrepreneurs and visionaries in the eCommerce realm.
After collecting valuable feedback and analytics from e-commerce owners for dozens of years, Norbert founded SyncSpider GmbH in 2016. After two years of
development and initial feedback, SyncSpider went live for the first time in 2018 as the first universal E-commerce middleware.
Norbert's long-lasting relationships in the e-commerce industry proved to be crucial for the formidable growth and shaping up the future of SyncSpider. The key elements for continuous growth and improvement were initial feedback, constructive ideas, and feature suggestions from new users, e-commerce experts, and well-established webshop founders.
Norbert Strappler
Founder and CEO SyncSpider GmbH
About the Leader
We pride ourselves in building a rock-solid platform that helps thousands of e-commerce owners earn more by doing less.
We understand that running an e-commerce business is a great challenge. Every day, hundreds of new apps are being introduced in the digital realm, so choosing the right stack for your e-commerce business can be quite complicated. Apart from being able to choose from over 300 pre-built integrations in our catalogue, we also provide setting up custom workflows for our clients. No one should suffer wasting countless hours on copy-pasting endless data between multiple apps.
Being an experienced leader, share with us your opinion on the impact of the adoption of modern technologies such as AI and machine learning on the data integration solutions niche and what more could be expected in the future?
I consider myself a strong advocate of the old saying – "work smarter, not harder." Let's be honest. When it comes to machine learning and AI, the truth is that many of us are still in the dark and falling behind on how this technology is being used in everyday business operations.
AI will reduce manual labour and time wastage by humans, which results in improved efficiency. There's no doubt
about it. However, not all AI-based technologies are useful and scalable, and hence, there is a serious need to evaluate which AI technology is worth considering for your business.
When it comes to intelligent use of data integrations, AI is expected to greatly compliment the human touch in the business scenario. As always, humans will have to acquire valuable information, and this will make sure the data is properly curated before a decision is taken on it. Over time, AI is expected to offer intelligent recommendations based on contextual data. This will help the business users in saving time and increasing their output.
So how can the business understand the importance of AI? You (might) ask? Well, businesses use different languages to express their needs, which is followed by a lack of inter-cultural understanding. AI is the bridge between the business and the users by giving key insight into the customers' needs.
There is no direct connection between the degree of adoption of AI and the business value that will be generated. However, we can identify certain drivers of AI adoption for businesses in
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the long-term – the priority of marketing campaigns, adoption of cloud-based business applications, hardware acceleration of apps, up to speed and accuracy of decisionmaking, and improving the customer experience, etc.
In simple words, try to identify the barriers to adoption – it's important to understand how the AI solution will impact the way you will run your business and what is it that makes your business stand apart from its competition. This will help you to identify the immediate steps required to move ahead.
Taking into consideration the current pandemic, what initial challenges did you face, and how did you drive your company to sustain operations while ensuring the safety of your employees at the same time?
SyncSpider has always been a fully remote company. We believe that a quality workforce can be found anywhere, and all employees should have the flexibility to set up their own work schedules. Our employees have the freedom to organize work from their home, a personal office, or any other favourite spot. Today, we're proud of assembling a multi-cultural workforce that shares the same vision and values.
The biggest legacy of COVID-19 is probably the increase in remote work. Like any other company, SyncSpider was not immune to the initial COVID-19 implications. The safety of our employees always comes first, so we've made sure to adjust our daily operations, strategies, and goals to be perfectly aligned with the general availability of our workforce and the impact that COVID-19 had on their lives.
Our employees have the freedom to adjust their own schedule and take as many days off as needed at any given time. This way, we've managed to
reduce the potential stress that comes naturally in such circumstances and increase the convenience and pleasure of working remotely. Despite the recent economic turbulence, SyncSpider managed to swim against the current by growing our remote workforce to almost 30 employees.
What would be your advice to budding entrepreneurs who aspire to venture into the data integration solutions market?
In order to do your job well as a business owner, the data workflow from all of your departments need to be integrated into a single nervous system. Simply put, you need to have access to the right data at the speed of light in order to make better decisions.
Data integration enhances the speed at which you can put new systems in place. You can move faster and more easily with the right systems and the right information. It also helps keep your team on track and working toward the same goal. This is why data integration is critical to business success.
With data integration, you can avoid problems like duplicate data, misused information, and other problems that can slow you down and cost you money. However, integration requires more than simply moving data around
and patching holes in your integration protocols. As you've heard before, you need to move the whole system to the next level.
Data integration helps address some of these challenges by providing a single view of customers and enabling realtime collaboration between teams. Many companies like HubSpot, Salesforce, and Microsoft use data integration tools to help bring together disparate data sources. You can collect and manage customer data across CRM, marketing automation, email, ERP, social media, even third-party ecommerce systems. And if you work with other teams in your company, data integration can help them access and collaborate with the data they need, so they can make better decisions.
New marketing strategies and processes are changing every day, and your company should be there to adapt. The biggest challenge when you are a small company is finding the right people and resources to get you where you want to be.
How do you envision scaling your company's operations and offerings in the future?
The primary advantage of working in the marketing automation industry is keeping in touch with the latest tech advancements. Our marketing and
sales team is in ongoing contact with new apps, platforms, and systems that are moving the needle into the future. Ultimately, this helps us shape up SyncSpider into a leading tech instrument for any aspiring ecommerce venture.
One of the primary principles of SyncSpider is to bring the future instead of waiting for it. This means that our business development team needs to stay ahead of the curve by providing innovative solutions to our customers before the need arises. New integration partners, improved workflows, and more intuitive tasks are the core services that attract many new customers.
The long-term goal is to work closely with all our integration partners on strategic content marketing campaigns to inspire, educate, and prepare our users for a better future with marketing automation.
The fundamental principle of our partnership program is to unlock all marketing assets to our integration partners in order to release the key information to the right customers as quickly as possible. No customer should waste time doing repetitive tasks that slow down the growth of their e-commerce business. SyncSpider exists to accelerate your e-commerce journey!
David Brown
Founder and CEO Toro Cloud
The world is moving rapidly towards digitization and new technologies are emerging with the process. This digitization process is now revolving around cloud-computing. However, cloud comes with high amount of data, and managing this data in a sophisticated way is a complex task.
Along with this, establishing an integrated network that matches the flexibility of onpremises and cloud applications, is a major problem for many enterprises today. This problem has opened the way for purpose-built iPaaS services that assist businesses in meeting the integration needs of today's business environment.
While many companies are running in the cut-throat market of integrated solution providers, Toro Cloud , a leading software solution provider company is making a stamp
Toro Cloud's Founder and CEO, David Brown, started his career in the software industry in late 90's developing ecommerce solutions. This experience led Brown to establish a successful online retail operation that ended up spanning multiple countries and industry verticals.
Part of the success of this organization was that many systems and processes were automated. The experience gave Brown a passion to create a software platform that made it simple to build and deploy automated systems and processes within an organization.
of excellence with its best-in-class solutions. Toro cloud provides a single platform to seamlessly integrate and automate the workflow of an organization.
In the following interview, David Brown , the Founder and CEO of Toro Cloud, provides detailed insights about his company, its services, and the ever-increasing demand of integration platforms.
Please brief our audience about Toro Cloud, its USPs, and how it is currently positioned as a leading player in the data integration solutions niche.
Toro Cloud, founded in 2014, provides low-code data integration solutions for mid to large enterprises. Today, many enterprises are undergoing a digital transformation by automating processes, communication with customers and business partners electronically, and creating new digital products and services.
Data is the oil that facilitates digital transformation. Managing that data and integrating the systems that contain an organization's data is a critical component of a digital transformation process.
We like to call our solution "the low code integration platform without limits." Low code makes developers super productive so that they can keep up with the demands being placed on them by management pushing digital transformation initiatives. It also results in solutions that are easier to update over time as the business requirements change.
However, if a low code solution only gets you 95% of the way and can't offer the functionality to complete the business requirements then the whole project can fail. Hence, we have developed a low code solution that never places limits on what you can achieve.
Toro Cloud's data integration platform, Martini, is the #1 Integration Platform as a Service as rated by customer satisfaction on the independent reviews website G2.
What other products/solutions does Toro Cloud offer, and how are these making an impact on the industry and your clients?
Toro Cloud's product suite Martini, Bellini, and Negroni, provide low-code, API centric solutions for API management, application development, data integration, and workflow automation. Our clients are using these solutions to make their organizations more efficient and respond faster to the demands of the market.
Martini is an Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS). It facilitates integration and automation of data, systems, and business processes. One of the most popular use cases for Martini is application and data integration.
However, users of Martini are also automating business processes (BPA) such as customer onboarding process. They are also using it for Robotic Process Automation (RPA) such as automatically processing PDF invoices received via email and importing them into an accounting system.
Bellini is a Low Code Application Development (LCAD) solution for rapidly creating business applications, dashboards, and reports. Users of Bellini can drag and drop user interface components such as tables, forms, and charts onto a page canvas to build an application or dashboard.
Bellini applications are API centric meaning that each component will display or push data to or from one of the RESTful APIs already in use by your organization. So, you can, for example, drag a chart onto a page and then point it to the API of your CRM system to display sales data over time.
Negroni is the world's first visual data modeler based on the Common Data Model (CDM). With Negroni, users are deploying standardized data models in their applications and integrations.
Standardizing on common data models enables an organization to abstract a data integration between two or more systems. It is also enabling organizations to provide governance over the way databases are designed for internal application development.
Other than that, we have our own podcast called 'Coding Over Cocktails'. This podcast series tackles issues faced by enterprises as they manage the process of digital transformation, application integration, low-code application development, data management, and business process automation.
We have had several notable leaders, authors, experts, and influencers in the space to give us their insights and tips to help enterprises navigate these issues as well. It's available for streaming in most major podcast platforms, including Spotify, Apple, Google Podcasts, SoundCloud, and Stitcher.
Being an experienced leader, share with us your opinion on what impact has the adoption of modern technologies such as AI and machine learning had on the data integration solutions niche and what more could be expected in the future?
The technologies that enable AI, such as cloud-based algorithms, CPU, and storage, are advancing rapidly and becoming increasingly affordable. Companies are increasingly incorporating AI in data integration projects either at the point of ingesting data or for purposes of data analytics.
AI can greatly diminish the heavy lifting often associated with data integration efforts. Data mapping powered by a machine learning algorithm can automate mapping of inputs and outputs. Data processing with machine learning powered data integration tools can parse big data generating precise data models from semi-structured or unstructured data formats.
Taking into consideration the current pandemic, what initial challenges did you face and how did you drive Toro Cloud to sustain operations while ensuring safety of your employees at the same time?
We've been holding up well as a company. We were given just 30 minutes notice by the local government that a work from home order was being put in place the next day.
We have developed a low code solution that never places limits on what you can achieve.
Fortunately, as most of our systems were already online, it was a reasonably easy transition for us.
Since then, we have had team members return to the office and then be forced back into lock down again. This has forced a flexible work model. I think it's going to make companies rethink the necessity of having people working from the office full-time and maybe having more flexible approaches to the workplace.
What would be your advice to budding entrepreneurs who aspire to venture into the data integration solutions market?
The data integrations market is already well served by platform players like Toro Cloud. However, there are niche opportunities in the data integration solution market targeting specific industry verticals or a specific integration scenario. I would suggest keeping your focus narrow and apply the principles of the lean startup.
How do you envision scaling Toro Cloud's operations and offerings in the future?
In some respects, COVID-19 has made scaling Toro Cloud's business model a little easier as people are now used to enterprise sales being conducted remotely via a Zoom call. Toro Cloud will continue to scale our sales model by creating repeatable processes with content generation that can be reused over and over again.
Our model is to generate sufficient content to allow the customer to conduct a self-evaluation of our products fitness for purpose. We are there to guide and help the customer through the process, but we are not there in a heavy-handed traditional enterprise sales role.
