Five True Tales of Terror: How Liaison Solves Customers’ Spookiest Integration and Data Management Problems

Integration and data management issues can be downright scary — not just on Halloween but all year long. Business leaders, analysts, IT professionals and others bravely confront a cast of characters right out of a creature feature marathon, including dark data that lurks in the shadows, disappearing information that vanishes without a trace, incredibly shrinking resources, creepy crawly computer bugs, vampire IT costs, the dark forces of shadow IT and zombie processes running in the background that mindlessly consume bandwidth.

Luckily, our brave protagonists have an awesome monster-slaying toolkit at their disposal as they seek to vanquish these formidable foes: Liaison Technologies. With solutions like the revolutionary Liaison ALLOY™ Platform backed by a team of experts, Liaison helps customers solve their spookiest problems. We shed sunlight on dark, dank data silos like Van Helsing opening Count Dracula’s crypt. Here are several true tales of terror that show how we work with customers to battle the forces of evil:

• Escape from the Zombie Onboarding Process: One transportation and logistics customer was battling an undead onboarding process that routinely dragged on for six months or more due to complicated integration issues encountered when adding new trading partners. The boutique company that was originally handling the function was overmatched, unable to field experienced resources and posing a high risk to the customer. As an example, one particular transaction took 50 web service calls to resolve. Liaison simplified and standardized the integration process, providing a secure platform and the necessary resources leveraging Liaison’s Managed Services approach to back it up and cut the onboarding process from months to weeks. Problem solved!
• Dawn of the Deadline: A major packaging company purchased an operating unit from a large paper enterprise, but the transaction came with an extremely scary deadline: The business had only 90 days to transition all the existing integrations to their systems. The internal IT team was brave in the face of this daunting challenge, but also wise — they knew they needed reinforcements with specific expertise and a robust technology solution. Liaison to the rescue — with our comprehensive integration platform, we had all their suppliers integrated and running well within the 90-day deadline.
• Nightmare on Data Drive: An industrial company that builds specialty vehicles and equipment was dealing with a frightful data monitoring crisis. The company’s integration team would howl like werewolves at a full moon when asked to locate a specific transaction because their scary data monitoring tools were simply not up to the job — more “trick” than “treat.” Fortunately, Liaison found a magic bullet in the company’s comprehensive BAM solution called LENS. LENS provides easy to use filtering and search tools that led to a monster increase in visibility and lifted everyone’s spirits.

• Attack of the Budget-Eating, Antiquated Middleware: A major designer and manufacturer of some of the world’s most popular products (music, gaming, video, smart home and computing goods) was besieged each year by a budget-busting maintenance renewal bill for their middleware environment. Maintaining the integrations across this aging EAI was becoming more and more burdensome due to the cost, lack of resources, and growing complexity — it was clearly time to tame this money-consuming monster bill. Fortunately, the company selected the Liaison ALLOY™ Platform to replace their current environment at a fraction of the cost. Implementation is ongoing, and once completed, it will form the nucleus of the company’s automated supply chain processes, providing a fast, efficient and scalable solution that leverages ALLOY’s microservices and big data architecture. Goodbye, budget-busting middleware maintenance bill!
• Double Feature — The Case of the Disappearing QA Environment & The EDI Staff Vanishes: Another spine-tingling tale involves the complete disappearance of a company’s entire QA environment. It simply vanished without a trace, meaning all deployed applications were gone, as if they’d never existed. To this day, no one can explain it, but Liaison helped the company get their QA environment back up quickly. And speaking of disappearances, vanishing EDI staff is a real issue for many companies as long-term employees retire, leaving businesses with a mysterious array of outdated software. Liaison can keep the chaos at bay, providing resources to consolidate the environments vanishing staff leave behind and future-proofing operations with our ALLOY Platform and dependable managed services.

As scary as these five tales are at the beginning, each had a happy ending. But for customers, sometimes the scariest thing of all is not knowing what is needed to confront a challenge, such as integrating EDI. The unknown can be positively spooky! Liaison’s team of experts can help. We use our in-depth knowledge to identify the hidden hazards and apply our awesome technology stack to banish the darkness.

So, if you’re seeing scary bugs, if data is disappearing, if shadow IT is lurking in the corner (and perhaps plotting mayhem with dark data), if zombie processes are feasting on your resources, who are you gonna call? Liaison! We’ve got the know-how and technology solutions to smooth operations out when things go BUMP in the database, and our transparent pricing drives a stake through the heart of complex usage and overage charges that can drain a company’s lifeblood: revenue.

PS: Got a true tale of data integration and management terror of your own to share? Leave a comment and tell us about it!