Are you curious about how Occtoo's Experience Data Platform works from a Developers perspective?
We want to provide you with as much information as possible about Occtoo, and how our Experience Data Platform removes the daunting, expensive and time-consuming task of creating integrations when you are building digital experiences. This week I caught up with one of our technical team leaders, Petter Klang to talk about how exactly it works.Hi Petter, can you tell us a bit about your role at Occtoo and your area of expertise?
Hi, I’m currently working as a technical team lead in the Customer Delivery team at Occtoo. What that means is that when I’m not working with any of our customers, I help the team with their challenges and questions.
If you were introducing somebody to Occtoo’s Experience Data Platform for the first time, how would you describe its function and how it ties in with the rest of the tech stack?
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. All this data is instantly available for digital teams to create real-time APIs, without having any coding skills
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, smart screen in the store, or a help system for your support team to keep track of orders. The onboarding only needs to be setup once, but from that data you can create as many API endpoints as you need.
How simple or difficult is it to setup and how long does it typically take to onboard the data?
As I mentioned, Occtoo has a simple data structure of key and value. The hard part in most projects is for the customer to decide what data they need for the end product and where to find that data. The process of on-boarding the data when you know where and what it is usually doesn’t take more than a day or two for a programmer to do. We have some quick tutorials to show how to get data on-boarded here, https://docs.occtoo.com/docs/get-started/
Can you explain exactly how an Experience Data Platform solves or improves integration challenges for developers?
Other systems out there, whether it be PIM, CRM or CMS systems are really good at what they do. But they are less good at exposing the data for others to consume. When a customer wants to launch a new campaign site, they usually need to integrate with two or more systems to get the data they need, and each systems needs its own integration. With Occtoo, we help the customer out and put all that in one place, and the benefit of having an API is that you can call real-time data to make it a lot easier for the customer to get the end result they want. So instead of having to work with the standard APIs of your current systems, (if there are any that can be queried in real time), you can tailor the API to the needs of the application you are creating.
Is there a standout case for you where a client has launched a new digital project using Occtoo and avoided lengthy integrations?
I could think of many, but one of the most recent ones is with Axel Arigato. This started out as a project where we were to consolidate product, price and stock data from SAP and inRiver and send it to their e-commerce, but when we got that up and they saw how quick it was it quickly grew and we are now feeding ten different systems with data from Axel Arigato.
We are currently providing the following systems with data: Digital showroom, eCommerce, Site Search, two different marketplaces - Omnichannel platform for OMS and PoS - CMS - Headless/serverless commerce API - DHL WMS - Integration platform - Ad-campaigns and personalized marketing.
Meaning that almost the entire Axel Arigato solution is built around our Occtoo platform all the data flows through us.
