Data Integration Simplified: ITSM Success with Automation

John Postorino:

Today I want to talk a little bit about integrations and the power of integrations, and what it can add to the success of your implementations of different types of software. Today we're gonna focus a little bit more on ITSM software because that's who we are as an organization. Flycast is an ITSM service provider. We've evaluated resellers everywhere from support to services to quick fixes. We've executed probably 5600 different ITSM implementations, and we're primarily in the continental United States and Canada. One of the reasons that we wanted to start talking about this specific topic is because once we do our implementations, once we get involved with the customers and we start talking to requirements in the things associated with implementing the ITSM solution, we find a lot of requests for integrations and it can be integrations literally into anything. It could be into a legacy system, it could be into a homegrown system, it could be into an ERP, it doesn't matter. We get asked all the time about integrations, and there's only so much we can do as an organization.

We specialize in the ITSM vertical. So what we did is we went out and found a wonderful partner called Launchpad, before I talk a little bit about Launchpad, I want to talk about our guest speaker today.

His name is Bruce Qi and Bruce is the President and CEO of Launchpad. And I want to say a little bit about Bruce as a person. So Bruce has been in the industry for an extended period of time, well over 20 years. But one thing I want to talk about, Bruce is a servant leader, it’s all about the people. And it's not about necessarily just the customer. It's about everybody. It's about his team members his customer base and his partners like Flycast, but it's also about his family.

I consider Bruce my friend. There are just a lot of different things that he brings to the partnership and he brings to the industry that is not necessarily seen every day with a lot of other organizations. His word is his bond, his handshake is true to the day, and we know if you shake out with Bruce it's going to get done.

Now, I want to say a few things about Launchpad. So all the different things I said earlier about the problems associated with potentially doing integrations and when you get somebody who specialized in ITSM, integrations aren't our strong suit. And we know that it sometimes becomes too complex. We could do a one-off but when it becomes where you have multiple data sources coming into some kind of repository, you have to make sense of it. That's where Launchpad comes into play. And that's Bruce and that's Bruce's background. So you can go to Launchpad, you can go out to their website and you could look at it and you could talk about taking fragmented workflows and integrations and make them efficient. Like anything in business, we look for efficiencies we look to reduce manual touchpoints, we look for consistencies and outcomes, and we look for having the same results each and every time based on something that we're executing. Well, that's Launchpad. That’s Launchpad’s and Bruce's expertise. That's why we established this partnership. And we think that between the two organizations, we can bring a lot to the table for a potential customer or a pre-existing customer in different verticals. So Bruce, first of all, I want to say thank you again, friend.

"Like anything in business, we look for efficiencies we look to reduce manual touchpoints, we look for consistencies and outcomes, and we look for having the same results each and every time based on something that we're executing. Well, that's Launchpad. That’s Launchpad’s and Bruce's expertise. That's why we established this partnership."
– John Postorino, COO of Flycast Partners

Bruce Qi:

Thank you for the kind words and we're really excited about our partnership with Flycast. The ITSM space has been very exciting and obviously from Launchpad’s perspective, and also personally meeting you and Nathan George, the Co-Founder of Flycast has been really really awesome to watch you guys the way that you treat your customers. And we choose our partners very carefully. Just like you said, you know, behind the brand, the company is the people and we really, really appreciate all the interactions we've had so far with you.

John Postorino:

I have a couple of questions. And I think they're questions that continuously come up because we're trying to understand this space that Launchpad is in, it's not new. It's something that's been around for a long time, but you've taken it, you made it better. You put it on steroids, and obviously, it's far more effective than it ever has been. Data integration in the past has always had a lot of workarounds, a lot of coding and a lot of other things. So from your perspective, what was the traditional method of executing data integration, and how has that changed now?

Bruce Qi:

Fantastic question. First of all, as everybody knows, integration as a category is nothing new. Ever since there have been databases, ever since there have been systems and software systems, applications integration has been around because naturally, data needs to flow from system to system and data needs to work for all the different operations within an organization. So that those workflows as an operation as an organization can work together. Traditionally, integration and workflow automation has been done in what we call a P2P architect. You'll be surprised how often organizations big or small connect their CRM system with their ATS system, and their ticketing system with their customer success team, through a P2P system. The issue that arises is scalability and also unified central connectivity. Oftentimes when it comes to organizations having integrations we are brought in to evaluate and look at it, I'm sure, John from your teams, oftentimes when you're engaging ideas and implementation projects, the customers say “look, you know, this is a great ITSM tool, but then you make our Chronos or make our workday Information System flows through over here?”, “can you make our call centre data to move over here? And we can automate that”.

So our new way of doing things is what we call an iPaaS or ESB. iPaaS stands for integration platform as a service and ESB architecture is an enterprise service bus. We have done quite a few of those types of integrations in the marketplace. We have seen that it really provides a unified activity for centralized enterprise-wide connectivity. What does that mean? You got low friction situations where not every single organization has brand-new systems altogether. As an example, Salesforce is one of Launchpad’s clients. They had old systems that have been running about 54 different applications. Now if you think about connecting those two dots, one to another that's one line by connectivity. Now you add a third dot that's three lines, four dots, that now you're looking at six lines connecting all four. That's the traditional way, so the more connectivity you create, yes, you're creating more value within your organization. However, if you're going through that transition, away from the P2P network, now you're looking at 54 systems that are in Salesforce, this global organization includes Workday, Oracle, their own Salesforce, ADP and all of the different systems. You're looking at easily about 1400 or 1500 connections. Now you've got a situation where the cost is exponentially rising in terms of actually maintaining running and upgrading these connectivities whereas your value is increased. So the gap of the cost above the linear value increase. That creates a huge problem in terms of technical debt. Now, enter our solution, and, back to your question John, “what is the traditional method and what is the new way of solving it from Launchpad’s perspective?”, is that by creating the integration through the central bus, now you're creating a many-to-many situation where if I updated this one system say Salesforce’s own Salesforce CRM system that propagates the all moving all the logic into the middle, all the other system within, you can reuse that logic and update so now you have a many-to-many situation. The feather that broke the back for Salesforce for our customer is they had four custom fields in Oracle one year, and it took them one year in the duration of the project. And about a million dollars in person-hours just to propagate that four custom fields into the rest of the world. This is where we come in, really putting that new architecture for integration in place. So hopefully that explains a little bit about how the traditional way of data integration to the modern way that we're bringing to the table.

John Postorino:

Thank you, Bruce. Let me ask you a follow on question that is, you know, the value of an Enterprise Service Bus, you know the traditional way and I think a lot of people who are in attendance today are more probably apt to understand the traditional methodology where it was almost like a one to one or, how can we get this to work? So can you talk about the enterprise benefits of utilizing an enterprise service bus?

Bruce Qi:

Absolutely. There are two major benefits to using the enterprise service. We lightly touched on the first one, which is scalability or creating a many-to-many situation. Now the one layer under that is usability. So when it comes to creating integration, going back to the first question on point to point, creating new components that's connecting database or through APIs or through webhooks or whatever the methods that matter. Now, if I'm in a centralized organization in ITSM, I would potentially have my customer information living in one, I might have my internal resources, and staff information living in another and then the application I might have my order system, I might have my ERP my financials and so on and so forth. By reusability, I mean we have connected the customer information and credit, one component as logic, and then we've got your order system that's connected. So now you've got a customer order system connected. So these components that sit in the middle can be reused. Now whether you are building more into the future, or creating more apps on top of these components, you can just reuse that, we're simply spreading this automation and this data connectivity throughout the organization horizontally. Now I can reuse those components every single time, now you're going to hit your Workday, you are you going to hit Bamboo, you hit your ADP and hit your Dynamics. That same component you've built once we use it multiple times. So that's number one.

Number two is about low friction. If you think about any organization, not every single department has had a similar journey. Right? You probably have some homegrown as you mentioned, John, and we see that all the time with our customers. We have some homegrown stuff we got your SaaS system, we just bought recently that major API, a great library that is robust, or we have a customer that's sitting in the middle of Ohio has a mainframe, IBM mainframe system that has a version of SAP still running on it, right. So as you're growing as an organization, that low friction method of connecting all these disparate, whether you call it legacy systems or new systems, modern APIs or through webhooks, you have, web forms somewhere that's taking in certain things. Now you've got a variety of different things you need to take care of. So through this method and through the use of our platform, we're enabling these IT services to be able to have very low friction and then tie into these systems all at once. Again, not everybody has, $500 million to spend on things. So, you know, you can't sometimes afford to say because the system that is not mission critical you’re going to dump it out with baby in the bathwater, right? So you can still continue certain operations but allow your organization to engage in this automation, progress, and IT transformation. So really, readying the organization for a hybrid IT situation.

John Postorino:

Is there anything that you've come across from a systems perspective and a request from a customer and an integration effort that you as Launchpad have not been able to facilitate?

Bruce Qi:

That's a really good question because you know, I would hate to stand here and say we can integrate everything where the collaboration with partners like yourselves who are in the space as being the subject matter experts say on ITSM right? There are limitations when it comes to API availability, and the type of maturity when it comes to data availability. What it does is that say there is an API available for most products database. You can connect to APIs to allow more real-time live data. Sometimes we are doing integrations directly with certain data or data lakes, data warehouses or data tables, for which there are certain security measures that we need to take. So it takes longer to do and it's a little bit more complex and requires collaboration with both clients and partners that are in that space. Oftentimes when you are making a decision, when you're thinking about integration, one of the key things is really to dig into the product that you are buying. Oftentimes, you will hear “we have a great API library that you can just connect to”. Now the question to ask is, “how mature is the API?” Because oftentimes, having an API doesn't mean the backend spiders, the backend exposures or the methods of those data are exposed either in real-time or are more complete. And that's going to really give you a difference in the results that you get in your future automation. Secondly, are you going to need to pay more for API access? There are some products out there that we come across all the time, we have to constantly remind customers before we engage, because, we're not in the business of just cashing a check. We're in there to see the long-term success of our customers and partners and make sure that you understand the license structure because sometimes these products would include a clause, if you want to use the API within their product, you have to pay a certain price more. So getting those pieces all well lined up and understood is really key to success and really avoiding where you may run into the preparations for automation and integration.

John Postorino:

Great. Thank you. So another question. Who is Launchpad? What do you bring to the table? We've covered a lot of this already. But who are you Bruce? And what do you bring?

Bruce Qi:

Right. At Launchpad, we really focus on integration. I've seen a lot of clients, from the White House to Coca-Cola to Salesforce and General Motors. These global giants, fortune 500 clients that we've been working with, everybody's struggling with the same problem. So especially as the cloud connectivity increases, now that we're coming out of COVID that drive for digital transformation, adoption for automating all these workflows and processes are becomes a really huge need. So where large data comes in and focuses on this market problem where there only used to be where enterprise-level billions and billions of dollars in revenue companies are able to afford a solution that allows them to solve that data-connected activity probably in a very graceful manner. Our mission at Launchpad has been to take that solution and create that platform that is able to be brought to the masses to our medium, small and also enterprise customers. So bringing that to the masses is our mission. And we do that in a couple of ways. One is, obviously a very well-priced platform that's very comparable to the majors in our market space at a fraction of what the licensing costs would be for comparison. Secondly, is that even if certain organizations can afford the license on our competitors, that's been around for a long time in that integration space, the structure of the model is that you have to buy a license that usually costs you half a million dollars. And then you have to hire resources, whether it's through consultancy, or hire in-house and you're competing, we all know what the resource market is. For very rare resources, and a very dear price. And then after you have done the project implementation now you have to somehow maintain the running. So both the setup and the maintenance costs are very high. Where we come into the marketplace is bringing as we said, that solution that was only available to the enterprise multibillion-dollar companies before. And then secondly, we are offering our platform through managed services model where not only are we able to work with our partners and clients to implement a built and post-production go-live. Just managed services running so you don't have to hire a team in-house, or expensive resources to maintain things where we have a customer engagement services team that is maintained on a daily basis that is proactively logging, reviewing and error handling and what have you. So that's really what we're trying to bring to the table and what Launchpad is all about.

John Postorino:

Thank you, that tool that you've created that enterprise service bus you’ve created what's the name of that?

Bruce Qi:

It's called Paasport

John Postorino:

And then so the benefits of Paasport by Launchpad overall at an enterprise level, what problems can it solve?

Bruce Qi:

The problem it solves, depending on where you are within the organization, say CIO, VP of technology level. It's about the enterprise-level situation where now you have a centralized architecture that can facilitate and enable you to move your data around in a very consistent manner. And create a standard, coding standard and API library for every single system that you're connecting with each other. As an example, when we work with, say a manufacturing client of ours with multi-billion dollars of revenue a year they have systems that have been running for 30 years, 40 years. Now, in order to put them to advanced they have a very advanced IT team or a modern progressive IT team that's really trying to transform their operations. The first thing we did is mapping out all the existing relational systems. There are about 60, 70 of them, we then mapped out how they're currently connected, a lot of them are manual and some of them are somewhat connected, say through EDI, that's a very normal way of connecting them, regular cost centres, their products, systems or logistics. So where we really come in is for the central IT level, creating the overall game plan on how they can move forward and modernize. And then if you go one layer lower to the development, or the maintenance team or the business stakeholders. The business stakeholders, oftentimes, I think I'd say this with a bit of a smile on my face, not every business stakeholder within your organization, cares about how deeply things are done, what they care about is how smoothly things are flowing through. Going from sales, to the inventory to your order fulfilment to your 3PL to your finance, and accounting. So through that lens, that business logic once again can be centralized reused and measured through a centralized KPI. Now, the third layer is really the developer's finger on the keyboard, right, so the technical staff. So from their perspective, it's all about coding reusability that we talked about standardization of all these connectors and within the Paasport platform. We have all the libraries from all of these different standards within an easy-to-reach for all the APIs and all the connectors that are in. So now if I'm a coder, I don't need to go everywhere to look for things, it's all centralized. And I know exactly where and how to reuse tools. And so that's what we're really focused on, and hopefully, that makes sense, John.

John Postorino:

It makes perfect sense. And this is kind of a follow-up question from a realization standpoint. So based on your experience and the things that Launchpad has executed for its customers, would you say there is a specific equation around, ROI on the initial investment or meantime value that you get again, I don't want to put you on the spot, but is there something that we can potentially take away from this conversation?

Bruce Qi:

So generally speaking, we are looking at, at least about a 400% to 500% increase in value-to-spend ratio. So to give you a quick example. We were just using that forestry customer that I was talking about. So one small component out of that 50 to 60 applications we're just talking about mapping. One small component is for the logistics, so they have trucks that every single day leaves on the north of the border on the Canadian side, that's where a lot of their mills are crossing the US-Canadian border, and trucks come to the border to US Customs. Supposedly their old system was sending documents, bills of lading and what have you to the US customs at the border. The brokers will take it and process it and then the truck should be sailing through. Now with the old way of connection and connectivities, when information especially through EDI that are sent through there's no feedback and error handling. No one knows whether it failed. It's not really automated in a way, now for every hour the truck is stopped at the border with loaded lumber and there are train loads that are on the south side of it in Washington State waiting for every hour they're losing five to ten grand in terms of the costs and the downstream impact. So what we have done is taken that integration component, first of all, fit it into the overall architecture and then start putting them through the automation process and the standard reusable components were built for other parts of the organization. And it took us about two months to build that and it went live in January this year 2022 and since then, if there are any errors before the truck gets there, those are resolved ahead of time because it's proactive error handling and that allows the team to really kind of you know, go into the process improvement portion of it. The savings simply have been in the millions. So now that's just one simple small example of demonstrating the ROI and other use cases, for instance, there's a client of ours who is in the sandwich-making process and I will not speak their names of them. On every single street corner, you will probably find one that's very green. So all of their POS systems in North America are based on their own homegrown centralized accounting system. But on a monthly basis now you got the disruption coming in from say Uber Eats or Skip the Dishes, you know, all these mobile applications. So what happens is now if I am an ATS or service provider in one of their locations, every app is represented by a tab. So I'm getting an order coming from Uber Eats, I still need to manually use that and punch it into my POS system. Now that creates a lot of issues around safety around efficiency. At the end of the month, the different apps, vendors invoices the Central Headquarters globally to the franchise. Now it takes months for them to reconcile because everything's all done manually. So where we come in is really streamlining and automating that. So with the automation now that has really created the ROI that we're looking for an increase in efficiency, reduce their error rates and also increase their safety standards.

John Postorino:

Good. And I know based on the conversations you guys had both in Florida and via the phone I know you'd have a lot of different success stories that are actually incredible the amount of money and effort that you've saved some of these customers and the scale at which you've engaged them and, brought that all into your Paasport Service Bus and made it all work. So we can go into a lot, we can talk probably all day about that. So I know we're running out of time here and I have one more question for you. I know other than having two wonderful guys working for each organization how good is the fit between the two organizations (Launchpad and Flycast)?

Bruce Qi:

Yeah, oh, man, you can get me going on this and I can probably talk for three days on this. From my perspective, ITSM is absolutely one of the critical operation areas within any organization. And we all know traditionally, there have been, a lot of evolutions or phases of ITSM applications that are out there on the market. And there are some really good ones now that are really coming to the market with very modern light architecture, with very powerful features. However, ITSM is soft, you know, it touches so many things from human capital to customer incident, incident ticketing, and ERP finance, right? So it doesn't matter how good an ITSM system is, it needs to live within an ecosystem at Launchpad we are not specialists in ITSM, we work with a lot of customers that have brought ITSM integration-related problems for us to solve and we're really knowledgeable about some of those workflows as needed. But we were really looking for a partner that specializes in ITSM, and knows all the evolutions from the traditional legacy systems, to also embracing modern products that are in the ecosystem for ITSM offering in the marketplace. So when we came across Flytcast, I think, Flycast has done a fantastic job in really servicing the customer base, and also the SME expertise on ITSM knowledge and implementation success. We’re super impressed by that. And secondly, just the fact that a lot of these ITSM applications are successfully implemented really helps to round out the edges for ITSM implementation from an integration and architecture perspective. So it was a no-brainer after especially meeting yourself, John, and you know, the leadership team at Flycast from Florida. We just knew that it was the type of people that really, really care. Our value systems really aligned. We are all about our people, our partners, and our customers, and I know a lot of companies say that, but we want to put our actions where our words are, and it was the same, the same cloth of people behind Flycast we felt that just resonated. Immediately I think from the get-go so that it became a no brainer, combining the natural fit of ITSM knowledge that Flycast has, and coupled with Launchpad’s integration, really the amplifier for a lot of these systems to be able to go into the proper ecosystem, and the people behind both companies, so I'm really excited about this, to see what we can really offer Flycast customers.

John Postorino:

Okay. Bruce, I apologize, I think I think we're at a time we only get so much time for this. But I do want to I want to echo a few things that you said. As you know, we've had an opportunity to be, I wouldn't say relatively successful in the ITSM vertical, but we can only be so successful in the skills and the things that we bring to the table and then meeting you, your team and Launchpad in general, and how that just is another tool in our toolbox. It doesn't necessarily even benefit us, it benefits the customers. So they only have one organization to work with and I know that we've talked about this and I know that when we speak to our customers and our vendors we also talk about Launchpad and really what you bring to the table and the ease of your solution. And it just again, speaks volumes, volumes of the things that you discussed today. You know, how you approach things, the traditional methodology as opposed to you know, Paasport, what it brings to the table today. I do again want to echo about you and your leadership style and the things that you bring to the table for your organization and everybody involved within your organization. And you know, I just really appreciate it.

All right. And then so so wrapping this up again, I just want to say thank you to everybody who attended today. There are a lot of different things associated with it. It's a very fast-moving industry. There are a lot of things that are being impacted by security. And when you start talking about different data sources, security comes into play for each and every one of those things, and you can read it on the news every single day. There's some kind of breach because of the security problem with it. It could be a vendor, it could be an integration, it could be all those different things associated with our nightmares and things that keep us up at night. So, Bruce, I want to say, thank you very much for attending today. Thank you very much for taking time out of your schedule to come in, come talk to me. I appreciate it.

Bruce Qi:

I really appreciate your time having us here.

John Postorino:

Okay, thank you very much, and everybody else. Appreciate it gain. If you want any more information about this, there'll be some links in the invitation that you receive to attend the actual event that you can click on and we can get some more information to you. And if you also want to see who Flycast is please don't hesitate to go to Flycastpartners.com and go to our website. You also see some things about Launchpad. You'll see some things that we talked about, doing things together, and some of the other products or some of the other services that we offer within the ITSM vertical, but in saying that I truly appreciate it. And if there's anything that we can help anybody with please don't hesitate to reach out. Thank you.