Harnessing specialist expertise to transform companies’ IT integration: Integrella

Headquartered in London, UK, Integrella is a dynamic, niche integration company, employing experienced integration experts who are trusted partners to their clients.

During his years in application development and consultancy, Marcus Davies became familiar with the typical problems his customers faced when working with the big consultancies. In the UK public and private sectors, in the field of IT integration specifically, consultancies were often not agile enough to respond to customer needs with the specific services they were looking for.

Applying his knowledge and expertise, he founded Integrella in 2007 to fill this gap of niche IT integration services to clients. Being integration specialists, Integrella soon became a well known name in the industry for their tried and tested tools, processes and artefacts that become re-usable and speed up delivery. Today, the company has also established an associates’ network comprising IT integration specialists who have previously been referred or worked for Integrella, to cater to the urgent needs of clients who need consultants and specialist resources at short notice.

Staying abreast of latest technologies and updates
“As an established partner of the most popular middleware platforms, we have early access to the latest developments and releases. In addition, we are often called upon to address specific problems such as legacy integration or work with minor platforms which require us to up-skill our staff in technologies we are not as familiar with. This agility has allowed us to shape and adjust our service offerings and business objectives to meet our clients’ goals and requirements”, said Marcus.

Typical projects for Integrella are in areas such as middleware migration, upgrades, selecting and implementing new middleware, as well as rationalizing and replacing point-to-point integration environments.

Service offerings include consulting, project delivery and execution, long term support and then a fully managed service offering which comprises all three of these services.

The company’s long term support service is often set up to support its own integration work over time. Long term support clients include major service providers to the UK National Health Service, top names in the Financial Services industry, as well as a number of High Street retailers who rely on Integrella to support the work of their own developers or other third parties.

Surpassing competitors in the market with specialist offerings
Like any other company, Integrella faces several challenging circumstances on its journey – such as meeting the varying needs of clients while coping with ever-changing technologies, standards and government regulations. Marcus specifically references rapid changes in cloud technology and regulations as a challenge. With its commitment to ongoing training, and building artefacts that can be reused for the benefit of new clients, the company has been successfully keeping costs under control while ensuring adherence to strict market compliance standards. Integrella is often able to reuse their knowledge and experience in particular business sectors by tailoring their offerings – for example they know the UK Health Sector have particular challenges and standards, which are different from the Retail sector.

“We focus entirely on integration – so customers can be sure they have access to cutting-edge specialist service. We offer a complete integration service, from consulting to development to support. We provide tried-and-tested key tools and artefacts when we undertake projects. Based in London, UK, we are easily available to UK and European customers during office hours, and to US and other geographies customers for support out of hours. We offer 24/7 support not only for the work we produce, but we can also take over support of work completed by third parties.”

“The key benefits our customers gain from working with us are derived from the in-depth experience we have gained in the IT integration industry over time. We have experienced and established staff, and we are well-known and respected partners to some of the key IT players such as Oracle, MuleSoft and InterSystems. We are always looking for ways in which the client can use our skills to meet their objectives faster and less expensively. This produces a level of trust and loyalty that works for both parties. In addition our customers benefit from having access to our in-house tools, processes and artefacts, which we use for aspects of projects such as testing, monitoring and governance. These artefacts have been developed, refined and tested over time, and have been shown to save customers substantial amounts of time and money”, he added.

Past customers have this to say about Integrella:
“Integrella has enabled us to work in a much more automated way with our partners. It is helping to reduce costs of manual data entry and providing a timelier passing of data between systems. Lead times are reduced, and the end result is improved customer service and the ability to fulfill orders even more quickly. And when you enhance the customer experience, it ultimately leads to increased customer loyalty and, at the end of the day, increased sales.”
– Group Head of IT, leading UK furnishing retailer

“It was clear from the start that Integrella knew and understood our requirements. We were hugely impressed with the work their team put into their proposal. The comprehensive nature of what they were recommending gave us every confidence in their ability to deliver. We’ve not been disappointed.” – Head of Change Management, National Health Service Trust

Talking about Integrella’s plans for the days ahead, Marcus said, “Traditionally clients have taken a tactical view of integration due to the cost of taking a more strategic approach such as setting up an integration ‘Centre of Excellence’. Setting up formalized roles and processes to support the integration in the long term may seem like a big investment at the outset, but it provides a more robust platform for the future. In addition it invariably delivers savings in time and money down the line. If I could give companies only one piece of advice, it would be to set up a Centre of Excellence at the outset. Integrella is experienced at doing this, so I feel this is an area where we will continue to add real value.”