Deep dive today with internal IT team @okta about our internal apps, data warehouse and integration stack. As an engineer I built PeopleSoft integration tech in 2000. This area has always interested me:

The industry has progressed! Here in 2020 nearly all apps have good APIs. Some even have complete integration platforms built-in ( @salesforce, @workday). A lot of the PeopleSoft lessons made it into Workday. Team calls out @Stripe as the “best api” in our environment.

Even so, there’s work to do. One complaint is that the ability to do webhooks/callbacks is not common among apps leading to excessive “polling”.

“Some things never change!” I was surprised to find out:

Just like in 2000, no integration vendor does it all. Different vendors required for row based/event driven integrations vs batch oriented/set based. Nobody has nailed both.

Just like in 2000 some apps still allow direct database access via SQL ( @netsuite):

Just like in 2000, some of the integrations are EDI (even though we were sure that was ABOUT TO DIE IN 2000)

Interesting that we moved to @snowflake for 3 reasons. 1> it was cheaper 2> easy to burst capacity (thank you @aws cloud) 3> easier to get data in and out and share data internally between groups

Interesting that @okta is getting to a size and scale that our internal use of tools and technology is indicative of the overall market!