Services
Integration and data
Your systems should talk to each other. Usually they can, and usually it's smaller than you've been told.
Who this is for
- Your website, your accounts package, your CRM and your supplier's feed don't talk to each other, and somebody re-types the same data three times a week
- You've outgrown plugins and off-the-shelf connectors
- You need to move data out of something old, and everyone you've asked has been vague about it
Who it isn't for
- Anyone an off-the-shelf connector genuinely serves
If a connector does the job, buy it. I'll tell you when that's the answer, and it costs you nothing to ask.
The problem
Every company that has been trading more than a few years ends up with four or five systems that were each the right choice at the time and were never designed to know about each other.
So a person becomes the integration. Somebody exports a CSV on Fridays. Somebody re-keys orders into the accounts package. Somebody maintains a spreadsheet that is, in practice, the most important database in the business and lives on one laptop.
It works, in the sense that the business keeps running. What it costs is a few hours a week, a class of error nobody catches, and a hard ceiling on growth, because the manual step doesn't scale and everyone knows it.
You've probably asked about fixing it and been told it's a big project. Sometimes it is. Frequently it's four days.
What I do
- APIs. REST and SOAP, consuming them and building them, including against systems whose documentation is optimistic.
- PHP. The language most of this is actually written in, which I've used for a very long time.
- Databases. MySQL, MariaDB, Aurora. Schema design, performance, and the migrations between them.
- Data migration out of legacy systems, including ones whose vendor has stopped answering. I've been doing this since the dBase era and I've seen most of the ways it goes wrong.
- Reporting pipelines. Getting numbers out reliably, on a schedule, without hand-holding.
- The unglamorous middle. Retry logic, error handling, alerting, and the reconciliation that tells you when a sync silently stopped three weeks ago.
How it works
This work quotes well because it's discrete. We scope it, I price it as an outcome rather than as hours, and it's delivered on a schedule we agree in advance.
For anything genuinely small it's £120 an hour. For most integration work it's a fixed price from a scoped brief. If we don't know enough to scope it, that's a short technical review first, quoted before it starts.
Consultancy prices on this page exclude VAT.
What it runs on
- PHP
- MySQL
- MariaDB
- Aurora
- REST
- SOAP
- AWS
Questions
The things people ask
How long does a typical integration take?
Days to a few weeks. The scoping conversation is usually enough to tell which, and it's free.
Our supplier's API is badly documented.
That's normal. It's most of the job.
Can you work with our existing developer?
Yes, and often that's the right shape. I do the data and integration layer, they do the application.
What if the answer is that we should buy something off the shelf?
Then I'll say so. That's the answer maybe a third of the time.