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The demand for an integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) is growing strongly, according to research institution Gartner. The growing demand is partly due to the need organizations feel to quickly digitize and automate legacy processes, as well as simplifying access to legacy applications. eMagiz, a Dutch software company, has a powerful integration platform on offer to seriously consider. “We integrate ‘any to any’, at a very attractive TCO”, say Rob ter Brugge and Bart Buschmann in an exclusive interview with Dutch IT-channel.
‘Data and application integration without boundaries’, that’s the promise of the integration platform of eMagiz, a software company from Enschede that emerged from the CAPE Groep. This group of management consultants, including CEO and owner of eMagiz, Rob ter Brugge, noticed that around 2006, there was a growing need for more customization in the realization of new business applications. “We were business experts and economists, so we wanted a ‘low-code platform’ that would allow people without in-depth technical (programming) knowledge and skills – so-called ‘citizen developers’ – to realize solutions themselves, “ Ter Brugge remembers. “One of the problems we soon encountered was the integration of these new business solutions into an existing ICT environment. How do you guarantee data transfer from A to B, how do you document realized integrations and how do you keep them future-proof? The solution was found in Sonic’s first Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) applications”.
Digital transformation
Fifteen years later and eMagiz is now an independent company, which separated from CAPE in 2011, and has grown into a specialized software company that is fully active in the application and data integration market. The Sonic ESB was quickly replaced by open source technology and besides the messaging pattern, the patterns API and Event Streaming were quickly included in the platform. “The origin and the growth of eMagiz is all about digital transformation”, Ter Brugge says. “To meet changing circumstances, integrations should not have a everlasting life, they must be manageable and quickly adaptable. Businesses and organizations need a platform with which they can digitally integrate new applications and systems, and a platform with which they can automate and manage their dataflows optimally. Our ‘Low-Code Enterprise integration-Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS), as Gartner and Forrester would call it, is such a platform.”
With eMagiz iPaaS, organizations themselves develop a flexible, scalable, and safe integration model, which digitally transforms the organization efficiently and to the maximum. “With our platform, organizations can connect all applications and systems quickly, simple, clear and flawless, and dataflows are optimally automated and managed”, Ter Brugge explains. By using flexible standard components in the areas of messaging, API-management, and event streaming, customers always have the best solutions for all integration challenges.”
Importance of integration
According to Bart Buschmann, Commercial Manager at eMagiz as of this February, integration is increasingly becoming important in ICT because of the innovations that are happening. “Whatever ICT-solution you develop, at some point you have to deal with integration. That’s not the sexiest part of a solution, but it is a very essential part. Organizations must have the right tooling to do this efficiently and quickly. You can come up with a fantastic IoT-solution, with a beautiful dashboard and everything, but if you can’t tap the event streams to collect the desired information, you practically have a worthless solution.”
According to Buschmann, a great advantage of the iPaaS is that it not only integrates applications, but also devices and for example IoT solutions. “Therefore, you don’t have to renew your entire hardware infrastructure if you’re going to work with eMagiz. It is a complete platform, with multiple components, which supports both (on-premises) legacy as the most modern SaaS-solutions and everything that’s in between. This is something you don’t see a lot with other platforms. An additional advantage is that all costs are directly clear. The platform digitalizes organizations, making them ‘digital ready’ without the need for new investments. We bring the full cycle of a business-related solution on board with a customer. Besides that, the TCO of the platform takes the development of a customer into account. They don’t have to directly dive into the platform if they don’t use it as much in the beginning. We can perfectly scale with the growth of a company.”
Low-Code
eMagiz works closely with the Low-Code Managed Platform of their trusted technology partner Mendix. “Low-Code is not only suitable to develop applications on a low-level, this also works for integrations”, Ter Brugge declares. “The advantage is that you have reusable components and that the complexity of coding and scripting as it would happen during a ‘normal’ development process, is eliminated through the use of visual tools. As a result, development happens much faster and users do not have to know the technical details. Our platform is particularly interesting for business experts, because of the use of low-code and automation they become less dependent on technology providers.”
eMagiz is used by organizations in diverse economic sectors, including construction and industry, transport & logistics, retail, agro & food, finance, and utilities. Especially to enterprises, which usually have in-house expertise to build and maintain a model in the platform themselves, eMagiz delivers directly. For the customers that want to hire external experts to establish the platform, eMagiz has a partner channel. Ter Brugge: “At the moment we are looking for new partners, parties that have a need for one solution for all their integration issues. Most competing solutions only partially solve an integration problem. They are great an event-streaming solution, or good API-managers, or good messaging solutions. Our platform does everything, everything is one box.”
Platypus
The platform of eMagiz also is fully ‘hybrid’. “It is ‘cloud agnostic’ – it can run in any cloud, although AWS is our preferred cloud – and it also runs on-premises,” Rob ter Brugge concludes. “This offers enormous advantages: less training costs, less TCO, less cloud costs, more ‘return on investment’. The market should know that eMagiz – a purely Dutch party that is easily approachable – offers a platform that can keep up with all the leaders in the Gartner Magic Quadrant, and that our iPaaS is available at close range and fits into any IT proposition. Just as the platypus in our logo is a real all-rounder, our iPaaS is suitable for all forms of application and data integration.”
