Software Integration

No application is an island

Many applications start out as single point solutions, but few, if any, end that way. E-commerce applications are notoriously subject to integration problems. Sales need to be facilitated online, inventory needs to be tracked and updated, accounting needs to be accurate, different applications are collecting duplicate data, etc. Chances are you have software handling these parts of your business already. Getting them to talk to each other reliably is, at times, a difficult or even impossible task. Sometimes the risk associated with integrating different parts of your organization's information systems is high, but many times the payoff of doing it successfully can be even higher.

Anodyne has experience in both consuming and providing external software APIs (Application Programmer Interfaces). We can guide you through this often times perilous journey.

Web services to the rescue

Recent advances in software technology are making these types of engagements much more approachable. You may be hearing about things like Services Oriented Architectures (SOA), Web Services, and a whole host of other confusing acronyms (SOAP, UDDI, XML) that deal with these connective technologies. While much of the chatter is over-zealous marketing hype, some of the implementations are truly remarkable.

For example, the EBay Developer's API allows companies to now tap into the huge eBay market place with automated solutions. This has given rise to many applications that the developers at eBay had never conceived or were unable to devote the resources to to implement.

Additionally, Anodyne Card Services provides a set of publicly accessible web services to enable integrating your eCommerce website with our card processing network. This approach greatly reduces the amount of time necessary to implement an integrated solution as well as improving reliability. Open standards also mean that developers don't have to learn an entire body of knowledge to implement each application. Once they have done one integration project and have set up your environment, doing another can seem almost trivial.

Internally, using Web Services or component based architectures create opportunities for software reuse that previously were untenable from a maintenance standpoint. Many integration projects used to be error prone and unstable. A change in the providing application could make the code integrating with it stop working. By using well defined components, issues that have the possibility of damaging an integration become obvious.