Why embeddable tools are the future of data integration

Data integration is a key business value to tons of companies — and embeddable tools are here to make it easy

tPhoto by Christopher Gower on Unsplash

TL; DR

• Current data integration options for startups and small business are too time-consuming and expensive.
• Embedded tools provide a scalable SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) model that provides startups and smaller business with a data integration solution that grows with them.

Imagine yourself in these shoes.

You’ve built an accounting software platform and have started to bring on customers. Your first two customers use Intuit Quickbooks to manage their invoices, so you built an integration for Quickbooks that syncs their data to your product.

Then a third customer comes along, but they tell you that they keep their data in Xero. What do you do? Do you decide to spend the time and money building out another integration, do you hire a professional services team, do you leave it to your customer to figure out, do you use a current enterprise ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) solution, or tell the customer you can’t support them? You decide to explore these four options.

Building Out Another Integration

Is it as painful as it sounds? Definitely. Beyond having to create new integrations for new data sources, believing that you can build standard integrations that will service every one of your customers is unfeasible. Most companies have custom data that is specific to them, so you’ll consistently have to employ people to add and/or maintain integrations to handle their data.

While it seems to make sense initially, it quickly devolves into a burden that eats time and distracts you from working on your main product (in this example, it is the accounting software). And each new solution you’re forced to make has diminishing returns.

Professional Services Team

You could hire a professional services team that can handle the data integration issue, but these teams tend to be extremely expensive, potentially incurring thousands of dollars of costs for you or your customer. You want to minimize any barriers to adoption — make this product as appealing to your consumers as possible — and this option could discourage potential customers from using your product.

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Leaving Your Customer To Do It On Their Own

Requiring customers to take time out of their day to compensate for a product that they are paying you for isn’t great. Once again, you need to make the barrier extremely low for a potential customer to begin using your product. If you have any chance of stealing someone away from an incumbent accounting software, part of the appeal should be a minimal switching cost.

Enterprise ETL Solution

There are seemingly endless options when it comes to enterprise ETL solutions, but the upfront investment that they require is way too expensive for most startups and smaller companies. Similar to the professional services team, there is an outlay of thousands of dollars that is required to begin utilizing these solutions, not to mention the cost for trained specialists.

So where can you go from here? Every option seems to be doomed from the start.

This is where embedded data integration solutions come in. These tools provide a solution that scales with the company, instead of requiring a significant upfront investment — whether it be time or money.

Embedded data integration allow your team to maintain full control over the integration process without having to build the integrations themselves.

Here are a couple of examples in the market that are blazing new trails for embedded data integration:

Stitch

Here is a dashboard that shows the amount of data that has been replicated during this users specific billing period as well as a further breakdown by source.

Stitch was acquired by Talend in 2018, an industry leader in cloud data services. Stitch makes it easy for non-developers to have access to 130+ sources so that they can analyze data instantly.

What makes Stitch unique is that their product balances functionality with an intuitive learning curve for everyone. They also cater to developers’ needs as well as analysts and those who do not code.

hotglue

hotglue is a new tool in the market that brought a whole new approach to data integration with its developer-focused embedded data integration tool.

hotglue not only retrieves and places the data where it needs to be, but it allows for custom transformations of the data as well. This feature sets hotglue apart from their competitors that just get data to the right place and not transforming the data to the necessary format— hotglue can do both.

Fusebit

Fusebit is another company blazing the trail in embedded ETL. Their goal is to decrease the time to market for those building products, similar to hotglue.

They are removing the friction developers typically face when they begin building a new product. Unlike hotglue, Fusebit does not offer the ability to define custom transformations though.

Conclusion

Data integration is only going to become more important as data continues to be stored in a great number of places. Having a fully-functioning solution available to anyone will allow for innovation and more functional products to be developed. Embedded data integration is going to be an essential part of that.

Thanks for reading!