Integrella
SOA Integration the Foundation for Delivering Digital Transformational Change

Marcus Davies, the Founder of Integrella, loves the buzz of working in the dynamic integration field; where Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a mission critical technology, often at the heart of all IT systems. Mostly, the clients are aware of the need to better integrate their systems and improve workflow, however they are unsure of their exact requirements. “At Integrella, we run workshops and gather the essential information to help build a business case and provide an unbiased opinion about which SOA architecture best matches the client requirements,” says Davies.

Integrella is a specialized SOA professional services company, devoted to helping clients maximize their IT investment by transforming trapped data into valuable information. This enables clients to make better-informed decisions leading to less expensive outcomes, more efficient business processes and an enriched user experience. The firm’s multi faceted team of engineers deliver expertise in business analysis, enterprise architecture, solution design, development, testing, project management, documentation and training.

According to Davies, business transformation projects are of high value, but can be lengthy, expensive and risky. With highly experienced resources and the necessary management processes and tools, the expert team at Integrella helps de-risk the project and increase the speed of delivery by using relevant artifacts and tools. An increasing number of clients want to leverage SOA further by capturing the data that is flowing through the middleware and creating a Canonical Data Model. The Canonical Data Model could be a database or a data grid, which, for instance, is populated with key information about products, inventory, orders, invoices and deliveries. “Using this approach we have been able to quickly create new services that leverage the information and trigger events on in-flight messages,” says Davies.

Explaining about Integrella’s work, Davies points to an example in the healthcare sector where a large hospital was migrating its legacy patient administration system to a brand new electronic patient record (EPR)—a job that requires uncoupling of a large number of clinical systems and reconnecting them to the new EPR. “With a highly talented team working in tight coordination, we had to reverse engineer many of the legacy applications to study their functionality and walk the client through the transformation without disruption to the mission critical service,” says Davies.

One of the most time consuming aspects of digital transformational change is testing— a laborious process involving both the SOA specialist and the client user population. Integrella has developed testing tools that can take feeds from the existing application and processes, compare these with the output of messages being sent through the new systems and automatically report on any differences. “This allows literally millions of transactions to be tested to give greater confidence with the new systems,” states Davies.

We run workshops and gather the requisite information to help build a business case and give an unbiased opinion about which SOA architecture best matches the client requirements

“Using a swarm approach to undertake fixed-price development, we deliver high quality work quickly by leveraging our automatic test tools,” says Davies. For instance, Integrella recently completed a project where 50 interfaces were migrated to a new SOA platform and tested 1 million messages like-for-like within 3 months. “We can provide 30 minute response times for our 24x7 support clients for Oracle, Mulesoft and InterSystems technologies,” adds Davies.

By nurturing the client relationships right from initial small projects, Integrella ensures that their loyal clientele always have the most cost effective solution delivered in an efficient manner. Importantly, this also ensures the flexibility to connect to legacy on- premise software that is still delivering value to the business. Integrella is planning to improve Project Delivery eXecution (PDX) methodology to deliver projects better, faster and more systematically. “Our goal is to become the first choice consultancy for SOA,” concludes Davies.