With the growing number of systems, data warehouses, various BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) devices, and enterprise and mobile applications, it’s no wonder that the proliferation of data is becoming a problem. Then there’s the challenge of data silos and fragmented sources. Data has quickly become key to the success of any company. This means that it is extremely important to manage your data efficiently and if it isn’t done adequately, various problems with inefficient scaling, lack of consolidated view of data, and data integrity can occur ultimately affecting customer experience.
Succeeding in data-driven digital transformation requires organizations to enable self-service of
trusted data. The traditional point-to-point data integration approach creates difficult-to-manage, un-scalable, and sometimes redundant data integration projects, which impact data sharing and governance. A new approach is required to address the data integration challenge.
We announced and explained the Reltio Integration Hub in a recent webinar. We also broke down the reasons why we developed the Hub, as well as the benefits it may bring to your business, in a recent article. In this blog, we will go over Reltio Integration Hub’s features and components. We will also talk about when to use the Reltio Integration Hub.
Reltio Integration Hub Features
Reltio Integration Hub is a low-code/no-code application that allows you to build integrations and orchestrate data flow between applications. It offers fast and easy connectivity to many different applications and systems, through the use of pre-built connectors. Reltio Integration Hub also features centralized monitoring and administration, so users can be confident in the delivery of reliable and governed data across disparate systems and applications.
Reltio Integration Hub comes along with a connector available to simplify the process of building these integrations with Reltio. It offers an easy way to build connectivity with your Reltio tenant, and it extract metadata from the Reltio tenant to allow you to build that attribute mapping through drag-and-drop tools. This connector takes advantage of many commonly used APIs that Reltio offers, so you may perform operations on the entities’ relations,, and interactions.
Reltio Integration Hub gives you an intuitive user interface to build out that integration, and high-grade security with end-to-end encryptions. These encryptions use key rotation, data masking, data retention period settings, and more so that you can control how long the data is available within the Reltio Integration hub platform.
To put it simply, the Reltio Integration Hub features:
- Integration orchestration, to connect and transform data across applications, route data with high security, and centralize monitoring and recipe management.
- No-code/low-code integration, which allows users to build between Reltio and many third-party applications without using complicated code.
- Pre-built connectors, which leverage a rich selection of pre-built integrations to speed time-to-value.
- An intuitive user interface, which is complemented by drag-and-drop mapping and user-friendly dashboards.
- End-to-end encryption with key rotation, masking, and retention settings, providing the highest security for your data.
Now that you understand the benefits and features of the Reltio Integration Hub, let’s look at the heart of Reltio Integration Hub- recipes.
Reltio Integration Hub Recipes
Recipes lie at the heart of Reltio Integration Hub. It’s a visual flowchart-like tool in which a citizen developer will build the connections to applications, map data, build transformations and other logic and build the data/integration pipeline. Unlike traditional integration projects, building a recipe will take hours, may be in some cases days and not weeks or months.
A recipe consists of two components – a trigger and a set of actions. A trigger could be an event in an external application offering real time execution, or you could run the recipe on a schedule or through a polled mechanism.
Then, there would be a set of actions that you can build around that trigger. These actions allow you to build the logic and operations. For instance, you might build validations, transformations, or enrich the data. You can perform exception handling, or build various logging and alerting mechanisms as part of recipe actions:
Map Organization Entity
Map Fields
There’s also a rich community that publishes recipes and builds connectors to various applications. As a user of Reltio Integration Hub, you can leverage these community-built connectors and use them in conjunction with receipts to integrate with external applications.
Note: Recipes are not a separate product. The screens you will see from the Reltio Integration Hub are powered by Workato, which is part of the Hub. In other words, Workato is the underlying engine behind the product, and not an additional product.
When to Use Reltio Integration Hub vs. Other Services
A big question, whenever a new and more complex product is introduced, asks “When do I use what?” and in the case of Reltio Integration Hub, “What makes the Hub different from other existing connectors, like Salesforce and D&B?”
First and foremost, it’s important to mention that existing connectors like Salesforce and D&B connectors will still be available to Reltio Customers. There are still advantages of using such connectors since these offer pre-built end-to-end integrations, and for complex use cases. These have matured over a period of time with inputs from customers, and can even be more cost-effective in some cases. As an example, the Snowflake connector offers self service onboarding that helps automatically convert the Reltio data model into Snowflake tables, and then keeps them synchronized.
On the other hand, Reltio Integration Hub can be used to integrate any source or destination application with Reltio. Note that it cannot be used with building out integrations to separate applications without having the Reltio platform as a source or destination. With the use of prebuilt recipes, and Reltio connector, customers build their own data pipelines and application integration recipes and are also maintained by them.
To sum up, the Reltio Integration Hub is designed to be used by citizen developers. It’s use cases include:
- Application integration with orchestration, validation, and enrichment,
- Event system ingestion and delivery, and
- Batch data load from any known systems.
Curious as to what the Reltio Integration Hub looks like? In our third and final blog, we will go over an in-depth demonstration of the platform. We will also work through some frequently asked questions. There was also a second webinar, Building Recipes with Reltio Integration Hub - Webinar and subsequent articles about this topic. So, stay tuned to find out even more about the Reltio Integration Hub.
Relevant Content:
Reltio Integration Hub: Background and Business Benefits