Asset Management Firm Modernizes Integration Landscape with iPaaS
How a leading asset management firm transformed its IT infrastructure through the adoption of Workato as its Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS).
Project Overview
- 130+ business integrations in production
- 700k+ daily integration tasks
- > 500GB of data processed daily
- Reduced manual workload by 2 FTEs
Background and Context
The asset management firm is the investments division of a privately owned bank. The firm has experienced exceptional growth over the past 15 to 20 years, which necessitated a restructuring, making it its own legal entity.
This restructuring triggered a review of the firm's IT infrastructure, which identified a "large bespoke code-base hard to maintain/enhance with key-man-risk." As a result, the firm decided to replace legacy systems with new cloud-based vendors, with SalesLogix being replaced by Dealcloud as an example.
A significant policy shift was the announcement of "No new development initiatives to be started." This underscored the move towards leveraging off-the-shelf solutions and integration platforms.
Workato was selected as the new iPaaS due to its:
- Powerful and rich development environment
- Ability to be implemented with a "zero, or near zero, code policy"
- Event streaming capability aligned with the firm's architectural vision
Current Integration Landscape
The firm's integration landscape is extensive, involving:
Key Design Principles
The project adheres to a fundamental rule: "Each system should remain decoupled from the overall ecosystem." Workato's Event Streaming feature is central to achieving this decoupling.
Event Streaming
The pivotal role in achieving system decoupling is played by the Event Streaming feature in Workato, which has been effectively utilized. Currently, there are 87 topics in production, primarily publishing changes from DealCloud (44 topics) and MUM (29 topics).
Standardized Project Structure
Each system is its own project with a standard structure for organizing recipes.
Functional Recipe Organization
Recipes are organized by function: batches, subscriptions, publications, and entity services.
Entity Services Layer
This is a critical layer that allows all CRUD operations to be encapsulated in function recipes and abstracted away from the business layer. This promotes reusability and simplifies business logic.
Triggered Recipes
These leverage entity services recipes to implement complex integrations with ease.
Benefits of Design Principles
Key Challenges and Solutions
IT Buy-in
Challenge: The incumbent technology team initially viewed Workato as a threat.
Solution: They were won over by illustrating Workato's agility. The team kept to tight timelines even when the direction of the business changed drastically.
Low Latency
Challenge: The business demanded low latency integrations (circa 30 seconds), but DealCloud doesn't provide triggers.
Solution: This was overcome by developing a configurable polling mechanism.
Staying Efficient
Challenge: As the project matured, task consumption became a priority. The inherent nature of Event Streaming can lead to unnecessary subscriber jobs.
Solution: The firm developed a hashing mechanism to detect and only process relevant messages.
Efficiency Enhancements
The firm implemented specific technical solutions to improve efficiency and resilience:
Configurable Polling
Allowing for adjustments in polling frequency, workspace specificity, and entities checked, simplifying deployments and decoupling from publishers.
Subscriber Republish Requests
Enabling simplified deployments, allowing for downtime without data loss, supporting multiple publication routes, and facilitating reconciliation.
Subscriber Driven Hashing
A fast and efficient mechanism that only hashes required fields, significantly reducing integration runs (5% - 50% reduction) and task consumption (using c. 6 tasks in c. 150ms). This is simple to integrate into existing recipes.
Success Metrics
The project has achieved significant success across platform, team, and business dimensions:
Platform Successes
- 130 business integrations in production
- ~700k tasks/day
- > 500GB of data/day
Team Successes
- Democratized team of ~20 recipe builders
- Mature governance procedures
Business Successes
- Vastly improved data quality and consistency
- Reduced manual workload - The investran team alone has saved 2 FTEs
- Improved controls and standardisation of procedures
Future Integration Governance Framework
The firm outlines its requirements for a comprehensive integration governance framework, categorized into several key areas:
Process Model Definition
Defining integration types (e.g., Near Real Time Master/Slave, ETL Source/Consumer), process templates, patterns, necessary interfaces, architectural approaches (Pub/Sub, ETL, Point to Point), responsible parties, supporting processes, logging methods, and issue/incident/support workflows.
Security Recommendations
Defining security concepts and ownership for each endpoint.
Common Component Management
Defining and managing shared components for logging, incident escalation, de-bounce, common functions, including documentation, training, and regression testing.
Distributed Integration Team Guidelines
Establishing governance practices, roles, training recommendations, and security/permission concepts.
Key Takeaways
- The firm has successfully leveraged Workato to modernize its integration landscape, moving away from a complex bespoke codebase.
- A strong emphasis on system decoupling through Event Streaming is a core architectural principle.
- The project has delivered tangible business benefits, including improved data quality, reduced manual workload, and enhanced efficiency.
- The firm recognizes the importance of robust governance for its growing integration ecosystem and is actively defining the necessary processes, roles, and responsibilities.
- The focus on efficiency, particularly around task consumption in event-driven architectures, highlights a mature understanding of iPaaS implementation.
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