Flowgear, Africa’s cloud-based integration platform provider, has helped telecommunications network provider ECN solve an integration challenge with SAP Business One.

As the fastest growing alternative telecommunications network provider in South Africa, Electronic Communications Network (ECN), formerly Nashua ECN, required a solution to integrate its various line-of-business applications to the SAP Business One business management software.

ECN operates a converged next-generation network over a number of mediums including copper, fibre and microwave, and offers a unique “one network many services” approach. While it uses SAP Business One as a management system, it also has a number of customized industry-specific applications that enable it to operate its networks, provide customer service, and manage aspects of the business. The information from these systems needed to be integrated with SAP Business One so that the company could have ‘a single source of the truth’ for the information. However, integrating these systems with SAP was not an easy task, so ECN turned to Flowgear’s integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) solution.

“Flowgear solved the integration issues we had with SAP B1I, and the Flowgear SAP connector enabled us to expose the SAP APIs quickly and easily,” comments Quentin Huggett, Integration Developer. “With our in-house technical expertise we were able to get up and running with Flowgear in a short time. The cost of Flowgear was also much more competitive than using SAP’s own integration solution.”

Because of ongoing transformation in the telecommunications industry, one of ECN’s IT goals is to provide an integration layer so that as business applications change all they will need to do is interface the new application to that layer. A further improvement will be to integrate their MetaStorm business process management software with Flowgear to automate and streamline the data integration flows between various applications.

“In the two years we have been using Flowgear, we have found it to be a powerful and flexible platform for integration,” says Huggett. “For some specific integration requirements, we were able to quickly develop additional scripts, and when we hit snags we found that Flowgear support was responsive and helpful.”

The fact that Flowgear is public cloud platform wasn’t a problem according to Huggett, “The Flowgear DropPoint system works well and latency is good.”