How does Harmonizer compare with other integration products?

So, what is this Harmonizer solution all about?

This is a great question because it is important that you understand the difference between the service we offer, and the offering of our competitors. This will inform your decision regarding the best fit for your business.

This is the gist:

1. First and foremost, a big difference is our approach as an end-to-end managed service. Most of our competitors offer a software platform. We offer a service. As simple as that. You will never need to log in anywhere or learn another application. In terms of product market fit, this makes us a great choice for medium (and small) enterprises with integration needs, but without integration bandwidth in their IT team, or associated budget.
2. We truly integrate with anything. Can't find the application on our website yet? No problem, we'll build it in no time. Our modular structure allows for this. A lot of competitors that say they integrate with anything, don't deliver on this promise.
3. We tailor our way of working to your business processes. We can interact with you as much or little as you like, and you can interact with our platform as much or little as you like. In this day and age of process standardisation, our customers and partners appreciate the personalised approach we take in delivering our services to you.

This means that, we do allow access to our platform for certain partners, where we collaborate on integrations for mutual clients. We usually design a process that works best for them - in line with our 'bespoke' way of working.

If you prefer facts / bullet points:

In a very generic (non-technical) sense, there are three buckets of application integration platforms:

Those that serve the top-end of town

• Typically managed by Enterprise sized organisation themselves
• Need dedicated IT professionals to support them
• Adjacent services to data integrations, such as API management covered as well
• Budget: ~$1m per annum (can be more)
• Examples of these platforms: Mulesoft, Tibco

Those that serve small businesses

• DIY web applications, for small businesses or low risk, standard use cases
• Inner workings of applications, or location of data not always clear (black box)
• Create and support your own integrations, limited to no support if they break
• Budget: free to low monthly subscription fee
• Examples of these platforms: Zapier, Integromat

Those that fit in the middle, between Enterprise and small business

• For the 80% of organisations that are neither large, nor small
• Mostly web applications, some are cloud ready, cloud native or available on premise
• Wide variety between platforms in terms of maturity, flexibility and service levels
• Some only offer integrations for specific use cases, some are generic/ anything-to-anything providers
• Budget: this too varies widely, from a low fixed monthly subscription fee per integration or data volume, to a ~$100k yearly software license fee (can be more).
• Examples of these platforms: Harmonizer, SnapLogic, CoreLogic, Celigo, Integrate To Cloud, Dell Boomi, and many more

Our mission is to offer the most mature, flexible, managed cloud integration service, as a generic integration platform, for a low, fixed per integration, monthly subscription fee. We also keep Harmonizer as secure as possible, to meet our client's expectations in this regard. Our market feedback tells us we are succeeding and outperforming our competitors.

There is a great summary available here on the Gartner website, which outlines in a slightly more tech way what options are available to set up your cloud integrations. If you're looking to develop a baseline understanding of what is possible, we highly recommend this link!

For those wanting greater detail and some official jargon, please keep read the next section below.

If you prefer accronyms:

1. Big-end-of-town: EiPaaS

Gartner defines EiPaaS is a suite of Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) technologies, with the E standing for 'Enterprise', often used to refer to larger corporates.

If we were to summarise simply, EiPaaS products enable you to create APIs (integrations) for on-premise systems and develop and publish APIs that can be used across your business by non-IT users. However, aside of the cost of the software, in practice, organisations often need at least one savvy IT specialist in house for ongoing support and maintenance of the product you are using, as well as keeping up with all the new features being offered by the EiPaaS provider.

An iPaaS provides capabilities to enable subscribers (also known as “tenants”) to implement integration projects involving any combination of cloud-resident and on-premises endpoints, including APIs, mobile devices and the Internet of Things (IoT). This is achieved by developing, deploying, executing, managing and monitoring integration processes and flows that connect multiple endpoints, so that they can work together.

An iPaaS is typically used for cloud service integration, application integration, data integration, B2B ecosystem integration, and increasingly API publishing, multi-experience support and IoT scenarios.

Gartner considers an iPaaS an EiPaaS if it:

• Is designed to support enterprise-class integration initiatives — that is, initiatives that require high availability, disaster recovery, security, SLAs and technical support from the provider.
• Provides user experiences that enable end-users to develop and manage integrations independent of the EiPaaS provider’s professional services. These experiences must support multiple integration personas, particularly integration specialists and ad hoc integrators.
• Offers capabilities for executing multiple integration scenarios, including real-time application integration, batch data integration and B2B integration.
• Provides API management capabilities to support integration.
• Is fully managed by the vendor for patching and upgrades.
• Is supported by a broad go-to-market strategy that targets buyers of a strategic integration platform, rather than focusing on specific integration scenarios, industries or geographic areas.

Customers must be able to purchase these capabilities directly from the EiPaaS vendor, without engaging with third parties, and the vendor must provide at least first-line support for these capabilities.

This market includes only companies that provide public EiPaaS offerings for use by subscribers in integrating applications, data sources and APIs. Vendors that sell only iPaaS-enabling software, merely provide iPaaS capability embedded in other “xPaaS” solutions (such as application platform as a service, or aPaaS solutions), or embed their iPaaS capabilities within SaaS applications, are not considered EiPaaS vendors by Gartner.

2. Small and Medium business solutions: Application Integration Platforms

If you are not looking for an enterprise (i.e. big-end-of-town) platform, but just want to help your business teams automate their routine, manual tasks to enable them to focus their time on running your business, the other end of the Application Integration Platform spectrum includes products such as Zapier.

The platforms can even be found for free – however, if you use these products for your integrations then something changes, or goes wrong, reaching out for IT help and support can be a real challenge. There should be no surprise that you do normally get what you pay for ...

3. So where does Harmonizer fit in?

Harmonizer fits in the space in between – there is minimal reliance on your IT team. They just need to provision (routine) access for Harmonizer to your current APIs. Everything else we take care of as part of our managed service.

We consider Harmonizer to be an iPaaS provider and we have highlighted in the previous list the capabilities we provide. Our roadmap broadly encompasses the items in bold. Aside from that, our key differentiators are:

• Harmonizer can be leveraged for all integrations. For on-premise systems with no API interface, let's chat about any particular requirement you may have – our experienced team of engineers are extremely good at devising solutions for any and all integrations you can think of!
• There is no requirement for any involvement of your business or IT teams in setting up, maintaining and supporting integrations – rather, we identify what is required for your integration process, set it up, manage, monitor and support it, so that business users need not worry about who to ask for support when somethings breaks 😁
• We provide a lot of value for our monthly, fixed subscription fee, going by our customers' feedback, as they compare us to competitors and their pricing

We always endeavour to write for all audiences, rather than just technical, however if anything in this blog does not make sense, please don't hesitate to reach out! Coffee is always on us 😁.

Or, if you would like to discuss how Harmonizer could assist you with your integrations, request a conversation with us here!

Photo by Rae Tian on Unsplash