SSI is a middleware platform that works like a gateway between your packaged applications, like ERP, CRM, financials, etc. and your in-house business applications. The characteristics described below help SSI in removing inefficiencies and improving productivity, thus making enormous savings for your organization.
- Reusability due to decoupled business layer — SSI is built using n-tier architecture with an additional layer to incorporate business logic. This makes your specific logic reusable for all your applications enterpris -wide.
- Platform Independence — SSI is built using Service Oriented Architecture and hence its endpoints can be easily consumed by applications built on any platform.
- Application Independence — SSI endpoints are versatile and can be utilized equally and simultaneously by disparate applications within your enterprise. Let’s say your company has a web application, a desktop application and a mobile application and all of them are required to support credit card payments. Then with SSI, all three applications can leverage the same Card Payments’ endpoints without undergoing any change to those endpoints.
- Easy Interfacing — SSI exposes its endpoints either using APIs or Services as demanded by the customer. Since most of the business complexities are embedded within SSI itself, the effort required to interface is minimized significantly.
- Flexibility — SSI is highly configurable and hence provides lot of flexibility when it comes to software upgrades. Consider a scenario where your company uses XYZ CRM software for your customer management needs and also has implemented SSI as your middleware to interface the CRM with your other enterprise wide applications. Now let’s suppose there is a need to upgrade your CRM to a newer version. With SSI in place, you will not be required to make any changes to any of your applications interfacing with your CRM. By just making a few minor changes in SSI, you would seamlessly migrate to your new CRM system. You can also leverage SSI as your custom business repository, thus eliminating huge recurring custom migration cost with every upgrade or even when moving from one system to other.
- Scalability — SSI is highly and easily scalable to cater to your entire enterprise needs by horizontally scaling SSI through web farms. SSI is a cloud ready solution.
- Versatility — SSI is a collection of business endpoints that can be either utilized as individual stand-alone functionalities or as a combination, tying them together in a workflow to serve a larger business process. This behavior of SSI makes it tremendously versatile and a powerful tool to solve your business problems.
- Extensibility — SSI can be easily extended by adding new endpoints without impacting the existing endpoints. This makes the upgrades small and cost effective.
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