Launching new digital experiences promptly can be an issue when data can't flow seamlessly across channels in real-time, due to the technology stack being outdated and built-in silos.
Individual systems in your tech stack have typically been built for a very specific purpose, meaning they contain data for a specific area, such as ERP for transactional and stock data, PIM for product information, CRM for customer data, etc. Integrating these systems is time-consuming, costly, and often holds businesses back from launching their most lucrative digital experiences.
These systems are built to create and store data, not to combine and activate the data in a customer-facing frontend experience, and it is in the latter where it creates the most business value.
Here’s the problem
The data you need to build a new digital experience is spread out over various APIs (that's if you are lucky enough that it is available through an API), in different formats, and in shifting scalability. For developers, the usual solution is to begin a large project of unifying the data; creating data lakes and integrating all possible data into one system, one system to rule them all.
It's down to your developers to try to figure out the lowest common denominator between the different sources and the receiving system; this, in turn, results in a lot of discarded and unused data that’s never used for the various digital experiences, the intent is there but it gets lost or downsized along the way.
New digital projects for frontend experiences typically demand around 80% of your time and budget on integrations. Modifying, unifying, and scaling data is a lot of work, and the infrastructure to handle all of this is quite complex.
With the rise of cloud services, setting up this infrastructure is much easier, but someone still needs to tie it all together and make sure it works the way it is supposed to. If done wrong, you could face runaway costs as the cloud services scale to service the needs of the various applications consuming the data.
So how do you avoid these complex integrations?
The main job of your system of records is to store and maintain your single domain-specific data. The role of an Experience Data Platform (Occtoo) is to unify and activate your data bringing it to life in front of your customers using real-time APIs. With Occtoo you don't need to rip and replace the system of records that is built on legacy technology.
An Experience Data Platform unifies data and assets from CRM, PIM, DAM, ERP, and other backend systems with behavioural and contextual data from digital destinations. This data is then instantly available for digital teams to create real-time APIs, without having any coding skills. Your previous investments become even more valuable because the data is easier for your digital teams to actually use.
Occtoo can quickly import data from any of your existing systems, as it uses an easy key-value format for storing the data. From there it’s easy to slice and select the parts of the data that you want to expose to the application you are currently building: be it a campaign site, a smart screen in the store, or a help system for your support team to keep track of orders.
The on-boarding only needs to be set up once, but from that data, you can create as many API endpoints as you need.
With a favourable license model, you have full control of your costs and there will be no hidden surprises down the road. Scale up as needed when needed to support your growing landscape of new and amazing digital experiences and don’t let integration of data slow you down.
