Insights / Integration

Integration first: the hidden cost of disconnected systems

The hidden cost

Disconnected systems don't show up as a line item. They show up as someone re-typing an order from email into accounting, as two reports that disagree about last month's revenue, and as a customer telling the same story to three people.

Large organizations have this problem at scale. MuleSoft's 2023 survey of 1,050 IT leaders found companies using more than 1,000 applications on average, with only 29 percent integrated, and 80 percent saying integration challenges slow their digital transformation.^[1] A 60-person company might run fifteen systems instead of a thousand, but the effect is the same: the CRM only knows what someone remembered to type into it.

How Microsoft Azure fits

Instead of wiring each system directly to the CRM, an integration layer on Azure sits between them. Logic Apps handles workflows using prebuilt connectors to common business systems. Azure Functions runs custom logic where a connector doesn't exist. Service Bus queues messages so nothing is lost if one system is down. Key Vault keeps every connection password in your own account.

The result is easier to change. When you replace your accounting package, one connection changes, not the whole CRM.

Decisions to make for every integration

• Direction. Does data flow into the CRM, out of it, or both ways?
• Timing. Real time, every few hours, or once a day? Faster costs more.
• System of record. For each field, which system wins if two disagree? The customer's billing address probably belongs to accounting.
• Failure handling. Who is told when a sync fails, and how is it retried?

Start with the ugliest one

Every project has one integration nobody fully understands: an old system with no documentation, or a vendor whose “API” turns out to be a nightly file. That's the one to build in the proof of concept, while the budget is still small and the answer can still change the plan.