What does data integration mean to you? That’s was a question asked many times while I was attending last weeks’ Metamorphosis conference hosted by Pervasive Software in Redwood City, CA. Integration is Essential Numerous presenters and attendees shared their ideas, successes, and of course horror stories regarding a wide array of integration scenarios. The one thing that became evident—data integration will become one of the biggest needs moving forward for any department or organization managing their business in the cloud. …

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A recurring theme in our business practice has been a search for a viable subscription billing service.  At least several times a year we find ourselves diving into the minefield of payment gateways, processors and third party services to support a new product offering of our own or for a client project.  In our most recent foray, I started out by telling our client that “handling recurring payments is at best a daunting subject, and in truth is most likely an utter …

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Coming out of business school, somebody once told me, “If you design a solution correctly, everybody can be a winner.”  It was up to the solution designer to capture every user’s requests, wants, and needs and to piece them together into a solution that creates high value for all of them.  Soon after, I entered the real world of system implementation and I soon realized that this advice was purely, 100%, unequivocally wrong. In the real world of solution design and …

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We are rolling out a project next week that is really one of our crowning achievements as a small company.  The project involves replacing an out-dated and cumbersome Access database that runs a sales and loan process for our medium sized client with an end-to-end solution based on QuickBase. What is most exciting is that we are integrating three external data sources as part of the process; web based application capture, credit reports and electronic signatures. Our recent adoption of the Talend ETL technology …

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On yet another application review with a prospective client the issue of potentially troublesome data entity relationships came up. A number of our clients are existing QuickBase users who have made an initial attempt to design their applications and find that some assistance is needed. The first thing we look at to understand their application requirements are the data entity relationships. This is done in the context of both their existing application as well as their general business requirement because …

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