FRENDS Integration Platform

Part (1/2)

This was created to document my learnings from the numerous resources out there. I enjoy learning new solutions that will complement my data analytics/CX background. Integration solutions are one of them as I believe as more organization go through digital transformations, more business processes will be automated and the need to connect disparate siloed systems will rise. This will thereby increase customer satisfaction & retention.

Hence when I first heard of Friends & its low code integration platform,  I thought I should give it a try. Picking up Frends was actually quite straightforward and easy although I do not come from an integration domain. 

IT Budgets are on the Rise

Businesses are turning to a variety of IT systems and solutions to support their operations since relying solely on one big system is no longer practical. As more and more organizations go through digitalisations, IT spend will increase. These days businesses have microservices, RPA solutions, mobile and web applications & SaaS solutions hosted both in the cloud and on premise. 

According to Gartner, globally, IT budgets continue to grow. Analysts estimate that IT spending worldwide will climb 5.5% this year to reach $4.6 trillion.The rise in IT spend will be driven by a variety of factors including, cybersecurity, customer experience, operational efficiency and adoption of tools like integration platforms to transform existing processes.  

This is where iPaaS solutions help organizations. iPaaS facilitates the breakdown of silos by linking data across both cloud-based and on-premises environments.They enable cost savings in development and drastically reduce operations overhead and also enable faster development of new services.

What is FRENDS ?

So what is Frends? No it is not that famous TV series back in the 90s (which by the way is spelled Friends), that is all I received when I initially ‘Googled’ it. I was even taken to resources to teach me ‘How to make Friends’. :-) 

Frends is a low-code integration platform that enables seamless integration of APIs and automations. Businesses can also achieve automation capabilities through Frends Process Automation with AI and recorder based RPA. 

Frends is a browser based E-integration Platform as a Service (EiPaaS), which means Frends can implement any kind of API integration scenarios. You can also expose APIs on the Frends platform & can consume other APIs as part of the integration processes themselves. Frends also supports the traditional integration use cases, from File Transfers to Data Integration to a complete business process automation. 

Frends has tons of pre-built integration functionalities in their libraries. Their architecture allows businesses to develop hybrid & multi-cloud integrations. One of the key advantages of their architecture is that it allows companies with sensitive data to have their integrations run within their own data centers. Businesses can implement boundaries on where, how and on which data is processed.  

In Short

• Browser based EiPaaS
• Implement APIs, File, Data, Systems & BPA integrations
• Low code approach to speed up development
• Connects multi-cloud & ground together

FRENDS Architecture

Quick mention of their architecture. Two main components make up the Frends platform, (Control pane and agents). 

1.Frends control panel (pink cloud)

All development work, monitoring, rerunning of jobs, areas where a human needs to interact with the platform is centralised in that one single web application. No integrations are executed in the cloud control panel, neither are any APIs exposed or any file transfers done. However agents are attached to that centralised control panel. These agents are the ones performing the integrations. 

2.Agents

Organisations can deploy these agents/remote integration runtime to any infrastructure they would like to. Such architectures benefit hybrid use cases where organisations' systems are located in an on-premise data center but they want to expose an API in the cloud. Or in cases where organisations might want to consume data from another cloud provider.

Hence with such an agent architecture, organisations could put those agents into data centers & the public cloud and choose which parts of the integrations are executed on which agent, and these agents talk to one another. This approach empowers organisations to leverage the benefits of cloud computing while maintaining connectivity with on-premise systems and accommodating diverse integration requirements.

An example of FRENDS's distributed architecture for a hybrid multi-cloud environment is shown below.

Such an architecture offers several key benefits:

All integrations developed on the platform, Frends uses BPMN 2.0 (Business Process Model and Notation). The main principles in creating this sort of integration process is that in the beginning of the process defined what they call a trigger. Trigger is responsible for starting the integration when a certain condition has been met. Trigger’s for example: An invoice file being sent to an API or an invoice file transferred to an SFTP server. If the trigger was started by the trigger mechanism, then send the invoice to an erp system. Frends has over 250+ ready made integration tasks. 

Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is a standard for business process modeling that provides a graphical notation for specifying business processes.  For information, see here. https://www.bpmn.org/

Once the agent has executed the process, organizations see a visual representation of the process in real time and see how the execution for each instance of that integration is actually happening. For example if companies are doing a conversion between an EDI or XML file and JSON, we can see the XML message going in and see the JSON message coming out. 

Frends implements the extract functionality utilizing the standard Tasks and has out-of-the-box support for:

• XML
• JSON
• CSV
• Fixed Width
• Flatfile
• Custom text format
• EDIFACT

Glossary 

Use Cases

The most common integration scenarios are Business Process Automation, Application or Data Synchronization/Replication/Integration, Managed File Transfers & ETL. And ofcourse Integration Use Cases, for example when a customer moves to the cloud and wants to bring in new data sources. SMS alert capabilities to a retail/Webshop for example Shopify. Or if new products are available, they would like to alert the customers via SMS. Or when a customer's orders are being processed, they would like to keep the customers up to date. 

Below are just some additional potential use cases: 

• Application or Data Integration
• Cloud Migration & Hybrid Integration
• Supply Chain & Partner Integration
• Compliance and Regulatory Reporting

Specifically in Customer Experience

Coming from a CX domain, I believe Frends can play a key role in enhancing customer satisfaction, loyalty and engagement by streamlining processes and delivering seamless experiences across various touchpoints. Below are some of my thoughts. 

• 360-Degree View of Customer - Integrate data from various sources, CRM, marketing automation platforms, support tickets, social media channels to create a comprehensive view of customer. 
• Omni-Channel Communication - Facilitate communication across multiple channels, email, SMS, etc. 
• Personalized Marketing Campaigns - Automate delivery of personalized campaigns based on customer profiles & interactions. 
• Self Service Portals & Chatbots - Frends can integrate chatbots platforms with backend systems to provide customers with access to information
• Order Management & Fulfillment - Streamline processes by integrating e-commerce platforms, inventory management systems and logistics providers
• Customer Journey Orchestration - Can enable organizations to orchestrate the entire customer journey across multiple touchpoints and channels. 
• Real Time Customer Support - Frends can integrate support systems with knowledge bases, ticketing systems and contact centers platforms to provide real time assistance and resolution to customer inquiries and issues. 

By leveraging FRENDS in the Customer Experience domain, organizations can create differentiated and memorable experiences that drive customer loyalty, advocacy, and business growth. Whether it's personalizing interactions, automating processes, or orchestrating journeys, FRENDS empowers organizations to deliver exceptional customer experiences that set them apart from the competition.

In Part 2 - I shall share my experience in creating a simple process where I get data from Snowflake data source, process each record and send it to an XML aWeb Service.

Resources

During my learning journey, I leveraged numerous resources: 

Fundamental Course : Link 

Documentation/knowledge base: Link

And some of their content on YouTube. 

Hope this has been helpful. 

Thanks for reading...