Selling data and system integration is a long process. Along the way, future customers have a variety of questions they need answers to before they can consider committing to an integration platform vendor.
This is only natural, as there are many iPaaS providers, and the capabilities of the products differ widely. As your integration needs are unique and may change over time, you need to find the best integration platform for your specs that will support your projects for the upcoming years.
To map out customers’ requirements, we are always happy to jump on a call with them and answer all their questions and concerns regarding the processes, data, connections, and security, just to mention a few.
This list has gathered the most common questions customers ask before they invest in an integration platform. This list of questions should give you a good understanding of the possibilities of modern, fully managed iPaaS and help you to decide whether it is a platform that you’d like to take for a test drive.
1. Can you handle any data formats, even proprietary ones?
The answer is definitely yes! Our integration platform can handle any format, from legacy ones, such as EDIFACT, through proprietary company-specific message formats to modern ones, such as JSON or XML.
We harmonize all the data into your preferred data format, so you don’t have to worry about translating or processing it yourself.
2. Can you provide solutions for ensuring that the data is validated and enriched?
It is possible to validate all data against your business rules during the data transfer, and if certain information is missing or the message includes errors, we will automatically forward it back for enrichment.
Data validation is still done manually in many organizations, which requires an extensive amount of labor force and working hours. Switching to automated validation and enrichment has saved time and money for our customers.
3. Are you transferring data in real time?
The timeliness of the data is vital. We can definitely transfer data in real time if that’s your preference. We can also schedule data transfers to happen at a specific time if you prefer.
4. Can you integrate legacy technology into cloud applications?
Offering hybrid integrations have been the core of our business. In many industries, the core backend systems are still operated on on-premise legacy infrastructure built decades ago, and these systems are usually difficult to integrate with more modern technologies.
Our cloud-based integration platform perfectly fits the requirements of doing hybrid integrations. Hybrid integrations make sense when you don’t want to get rid of your current systems or simply you just can’t. In that case, iPaaS can add a layer of modernization to your current systems.
If you have wanted to learn more about hybrid integrations, please check out this page, as well as our guide on hybrid integration published on our blog.
5. Do you offer API management?
APIs are essential building blocks of integration solutions. We are not only using APIs for enabling connections across trading partners, but we also offer the possibility of hosting your APIs in the cloud if you want to build the connections yourself, as you only need a few one, and using APIs makes sense.
6. Does Youredi provide a managed service/a turnkey solution?
This is probably the most frequently asked question that we get. Youredi iPaaS is a completely managed service, developed, tested, and deployed by our Professional Services team and maintained by our Support team. We take all the hassle away from you. You define the case, give us the contact information of your stakeholders, and we will handle the rest.
However, if you prefer to build integrations yourself, you can get training from us for using our iPaaS and build integrations on top of it by yourself.
7. How quickly can you develop new solutions?
The answer to this question depends a lot on your case. Depending on the complexity of the solution, the first integrations can be deployed in just a few days or a few weeks.
8. How quickly can you onboard new integrations?
Once again, it depends on the complexity of the case. However, developing, testing, and deploying a new integration can even happen in hours or in a few days. Just recently, we managed to do a complex high-volume integration in 10 days while it would have lasted almost a year for another vendor.
9. Do you provide training?
As mentioned above, if you prefer to build and maintain integrations yourself on top of Youredi’s iPaaS, we can provide training sessions on-site.
10. Do I need to employ integration architects?
No, you don’t need to. Our integration experts will do all the work for you. All you need to have is a contact person from your IT team that assist our teams by answering their questions or setting up servers if necessary.
11. Do you provide support for maintaining the solutions?
We provide full support for maintaining the solutions. Depending on your requirements, you can choose the support plan that fits your need the most. Currently, we are providing 4 levels of support bronze, silver, gold, and platinum.
12. How do you price the solution?
Traditionally integration solutions have been expensive, and we wanted to change that and make it more accessible for companies of any size. As the importance of data is growing and companies are generating more and more data (that is also located in various sources and often in silos), the pricing model that we have created ensures that despite the need for more connections and you transfer more data, in the end, your invoices are not going to increase significantly.
When using Youredi, you are paying for using our platform instead of the traditional pricing models when you were paying integration architects by the hour.
The pricing model is simple: you pay for the deployment once, and then you pay a subscription plus additional support fees.
For more information on pricing, visit our dedicated pricing page, where we answer the frequently asked questions.
13. How do you implement changes to the solution?
When your requirements change, we can discuss the best way to move forward. Some small changes can be implemented by our support team in under a few hours, while bigger changes require that our professional services team do new development work with testing and deployment.
In all cases, we will provide you with an estimate of the work that you can agree to before we would start the implementation. Thus there are no surprises.
14. How scalable is the solution?
One of the best features of our integration platform is that it is highly scalable. During the development of the platform, this has been one of the top priorities, as we understood that ecosystems of our clients might expand quickly and the amount of the data is going to explode, too.
If we need to build new connections for your already existing solutions or there is an unexpected increase in the amount of data that we are going to process, we will adjust the solution, as well as the pricing will reflect the changes. Generally, the more data you transfer through our platform, the cheaper the unit price gets.
15. Can you help us to define the scope of the project before we would make a decision?
In all cases, our teams work closely with you to answer all your questions and help you to define the scope of the project. Finding a pilot case is very important, as this can prove whether the solution is the right for what you need in terms of data and system integrations.
Once the pilot has been executed successfully, it’s easier to move forward with the rest of the project.
16. Do I have full ownership of my data?
Youredi does not own or store your data. The data is only moving through our solutions in the cloud, but you maintain complete ownership of your data. Although, if you want, we can store the data on your behalf, as well as provide data logs for your reference.
17. How secure is to transfer business-critical data through cloud solutions?
Transferring your information through our integrations in the cloud is secure. Our technical teams are happily answering any of your questions regarding security and comply with your security assessments if you find it necessary.
18. Which industries use your services?
Although global supply chain and logistics have been our main domain, we have customers such as financial institutes, SaaS companies and LogTech vendors, governmental operators, posts, and e-commerce. Our platform is a good fit for integrations in any industry.
19. Can you provide us with business intelligence regarding the data that is flowing through your services?
Some of our customers have been using our Business Activity Monitoring solutions to follow their information flows. It perfectly complements the integration solutions and enables you to act on the insights and fine-tune your processes. We can also transfer the data into your own Business Intelligence platforms if you want.
20. How is your solution better than others on the market?
Apart from the proprietary technology (Youredi iPaaS), Youred offers extensive data connectivity and management experience. So, working with us, you get a solution combining both - all the benefits of the Youredi iPaaS platform, capable of working with various data formats, standards, and interfaces, as well as the unique expertise and skills of our team to complement the technology. So, our fully managed solutions do not require investing millions in upfront costs, making any changes to your IT system, or having a team of in-house integration experts.
21. What kind of integration does Youredi capable of?
Youredi provides universal connectivity options such as Business-to-business integration, Data Integration, Enterprise integration, Hybrid integration (connectivity between cloud and on-premise applications), and connectivity between old and new interfaces (API/EDI connectivity).
22. What value do you add to your customer's business?
We simplify our customer's processes with integrations to ensure process efficiency and automation. As we believe an integration project requires skilled talent to plan, develop and run it (which often is a scarce thing), we also take care of all the steps from designing to implementation and maintenance on behalf of our clients.
23. What are the key use cases of iPaaS?
- iPaaS can simplify and automate your business processes,
- Improve data security and error detection
- Unlock data silos and centralize integrations
- Enable scalability in your IT landscape
- Increase ROI
- Reduce TCO.
24. Does Youredi iPaaS have any GUI (Graphical User Interface)?
The philosophy we have at Youredi is to help our clients simplify and streamline their integrations. So to lp help our customers avoid having one more application or interface in their stack, we deliver all the data directly to their central IT system.
25. HOW MUCH DOES YOUR SERVICE COST?
Here at Youredi, we have a simple and transparent pricing model. Specifically, the price for the service incurs two parts - an initial setup fee and a monthly subscription fee. Whereas the former depends on the specifics of the use case (e.g., the number of connections and message types to be exchanged), the latter depends on data volumes that will be sent monthly.
iPaaS is the right choice for any data and system integration case
Although the capabilities of iPaaS depend on the vendor or solution provider you work with, in the big picture, modern iPaaS is a very versatile tool. So, it can fulfill any data or system integration needs that you might have.
Do you have any questions that we didn’t answer in this post? You can always send those to us via the contact us form or at talktous@youredi.com, and we will get back to you with the answers shortly. Also, we advise you to check our FAQ page to get a better understanding of what Youredi is and what we offer.
For more information and specs, download our iPaaS product sheet:
Editor’s note: This article was originally published in 2018. It was updated on February 7th, 2023, to reflect the most current information. Andrei Radchenko contributed to this story.
