Data APIs and Integration: Connecting Your Data to Other Systems
Modern organisations operate many software systems — and business value is increasingly derived from connecting these systems to share data. Well-designed data APIs and integrations enable your platforms to participate in a broader data ecosystem: feeding marketing platforms, powering BI tools, syncing with ERP and CRM systems, and enabling third-party analysis.
Common Data Integration Scenarios
- CRM data sync: Keeping customer data consistent between your application and your CRM (Salesforce, HubSpot)
- Analytics platform feeding: Pushing event data to analytics tools (Mixpanel, Amplitude) for product analysis
- BI tool connectivity: Exposing data warehouse access to BI tools (Looker, Tableau, Metabase)
- Marketing automation: Syncing user segments and behaviour to email and marketing platforms (Klaviyo, Braze, HubSpot Marketing)
- Finance system integration: Pushing transaction and revenue data to accounting systems
Integration Architecture Approaches
- Direct API-to-API: Application calls another application's API directly — simple but creates tight coupling
- Event-driven via message broker: Events published to a message broker (Kafka, SNS/SQS) consumed by integrations — loose coupling, more resilient
- iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service): Zapier, Make, Workato, Boomi — no-code/low-code integration platforms that connect APIs without custom code
- Data warehouse as hub: All systems push data to a central warehouse — integrations read from the warehouse rather than each other