ℹ️What is Formata?

Formata is your software application situated between all other software applications, connecting them as one. Its purpose is to fill the gaps between applications for you, unifying and transforming data to be used in each application context.

Used to unify APIs, orchestrate data, and create software integrations, Formata can give you the ownership and flexibility of building in-house, while helping you go to market much faster and streamline development.

What is Software Integration?

At its core, software integration is a very simple concept, consisting of a service provider and a service consumer. We call these service interfaces APIs (Application Programming Interface). APIs define how a consumer can interact with a service provider programmatically. For example, Stripe is a payment processing provider. They allow consumers of their service to create subscriptions, process payments, manage customers, etc... through their API.

Software applications use many APIs to function, both from within the same organization and externally (like Stripe). Because software is getting so complex and capable (AI, micro-services, cloud-native, distributed systems, etc...), we divide applications into more applications, each with more specific responsibilities that work together as one to serve users. This means that the number of APIs an application needs to consume to meet customer demand is growing exponentially.

How is Software Integration done?

Developers use many strategies to create, use, and maintain integrations with service providers. The most common by far is to build them in-house (create their own services to wrap external services). In an ideal world, this is the way to go. Actually, in an ideal world, you wouldn't integrate with others, but rather build everything yourself, Gen AI models and all! I'm joking a bit here, but it's how developers are forced to think about integrations to maintain the control and flexibility needed to inject their business logic, transform data, and have a maintainable, reusable connection.

This integration flexibility and control comes with a lot of opportunity costs. Increased time-to-market, hiring additional engineers, additional code repositories, CI/CD & custom cloud infrastructure, a lot of additional documentation to create, longer onboarding of engineers, and more product complexity in general.

For modern applications that use many other applications to function, the cost of creating integrations in-house exceeds the benefits by far. This is why Unified API and iPaaS (Integration Platform-as-a-Service) companies exist.

Unified API

Unified APIs attack this problem at the service provider level, with the goal of being the singular and complete service provider (API) for your application. This can simplify the problem for some, but in principle, doesn't do anything to help alleviate the real costs of integrations. The difference between offering 10 integrations with 7 providers and 15 integrations with 3 providers isn't very exciting when still needing to build infrastructure, create docs, hire engineers, etc... Especially given a Unified API is going to limit what you're able to do with each original API provider.

iPaaS

Integration platforms attack this problem on the service consumer side, creating and maintaining API connectors for developers to use. Essentially, it's like having API connections already built for yourself - just start using the connectors the iPaaS offers to integrate with many service providers very quickly.

Unlike unified APIs, this strategy often scales much further and helps reduce the engineering burden on your team.

Where iPaaS struggles is in the fact that your engineering team must operate within the constraints of the iPaaS platform - the technologies/languages they use, how they want you to customize their connectors (if possible), and their library of integrations.

It's often also very difficult to combine iPaaS connectors for orchestration purposes. Most iPaaS platforms that market to data orchestration needs have a very complex and over-engineered way of combining systems, costing valuable time-to-market and engineering resources.

Formata Integrations

Both unified APIs and iPaaS platforms can offer benefits for software teams. However, the vast majority of integrations require more flexibility and ownership than these solutions can provide. This is why most software teams build integrations in-house. It's in these situations that Formata can really help teams ship faster, convert more customers, and streamline operations.

First and foremost, Formata is a data infrastructure-as-a-service, which means we solve the hard parts of creating a unified data service to connect your applications with their dependencies while simplifying the process of building your own unified APIs and connectors on top. Simply put, we're a lower-level alternative that gives you more control and options for how you orchestrate applications and their data.

With Formata, you can leverage a unified API template on our community-driven marketplace to simplify the service provider side of the equation, while also adding custom logic and treating endpoints as connectors to simplify the service consumer side. It's the best of both worlds!

Take a look at our Quickstart to see how Formata can help you with your software integrations today!