Frends
Consolidating Data with Impeccable iPaaS

Similar to fossil fuels powering diesel and steam engines that started the first industrial revolution, data has taken up a paramount role in helping the business landscape carve its place in the current era of tech-driven disruption—Industry 4.0. And with the increasing awareness of the significance of data in enhancing the efficiencies of several organizational facets, firms across all industry sectors are deploying multiple, disparate software and hardware offerings. However, in their pursuit to implement solutions that come together to deliver the IT-landscape that they desire, companies have to spend a significant amount of their OPEX and hire technically competent coders that can integrate the data across several siloed sources. So what can a business do when it lacks the resources to effectively manage data across different systems operating on separate platforms that individually are an integral role in their operations?

Finnish IT company Frends answers this question with its innovative iPaaS solution that connects otherwise disjointed systems to deliver a unified solution its clients. The company’s platform acts as a conduit for communication between multiple systems and simplifies data integration and sharing processes. “With Frends, organisations can develop, manage, and secure all their API integrations within a single, simple, lean, and low-code platform,” says Jukka Rautio, senior VP at Frends.

The company’s flagship product is an eiPaaS instead of a typical iPaaS as it is purpose-built to help businesses cope with the evolving cloud adoption trends in the overall business landscape. In fact, Frends’ clients can seamlessly perform cloud service integration (CSI), application-to-application integration (A2A), business-to-business integration (B2B) scenarios, mobile application integration (MAI), and IoT integration scenarios.

The Frends platform enables these processes by developing, deploying, executing, managing and monitoring integration processes that connect multiple endpoints in various deployment models so that they can work together. With such an extensive range of capabilities, Frends has built an expansive clientele across a plethora of markets including finance, retail, energy & utilities, manufacturing, education, and many more.

Apart from its comprehensive feature set, the Frends platform also supports business process automation, which is utilised to create short and long-running business process automations powered by the visual BPMN 2.0 based process modelling language. And as all integration scenarios are modelled utilising the BPMN standard, Frends is automatically very capable of implementing process automation scenarios. For instance, when it comes to implementing a process automation solution in Frends, users simply have to model out the technical process including decisions, business logic, loops, error handling and so on. Once this is done, the solution configures each activity in the process sequence to pre-form a desired functionality. At the same time, to eliminate the costs of hiring expensive coders to write integration code, the company opts for a low-code approach to design integrations and APIs quickly and with minimum human-coding.

Highlighting the impacts of the Frends platform is a client success story where the company assisted a leading commercial television company in Finland to automate their existing business processes using AI and ML. One of the biggest challenges was the maintenance of legacy systems. Furthermore the client’s rapid growth, intensified competition and the need to transform into truly multi-channel operations posed challenges for the client’s ICT operations department to respond quickly and agilely to business requirements. In order to address those issues, the customer needed to onboard new systems and services at an extremely high rate. Despite this, the client could not shut down their existing legacy systems due to dependencies created directly between the older and newer systems, which eventually led to the commercial TV organisation’s operational tech stack to consist of numerous systems implemented with different technologies. Once Frends was approached, the company facilitated communication between multiple legacy systems and more modern services built in the cloud. As a result, Frends simplified the client’s business processes while saving time and money through business process automation and visibility into integration flows.

Looking ahead, as the post-pandemic business landscape drives toward more digitalised operations, Frends, with its innovative eiPaaS solution is perfectly poised to help organisations connect their tech-driven deployments and make the most of their data.