Highly specialized white label services are changing the way businesses can leverage technology. Integrators with the necessary skills and vision can utilize these services in new and innovative ways, to the benefit of companies looking to reduce costs and focus on their core business.
The role of the integrator is crucial to the success of coordinating white label services with the business needs of a company. By combining specialized white label services from various providers, and managing the way they communicate with one another, an integrator can more effectively create systems that conform to a company's own business workflows.
Integrators face the challenge of finding and connecting white label services that meet the criteria necessary for implementing this type of solution. Creating holistic business system solutions requires the existence of white label services which conform to a number of crucial requirements.
Focus On Core Competency
When building business systems from a collection of white label services, an integrator searches for services that are designed to fulfill a specific function, and performs that function at the highest possible standard. Unfortunately, the services offered by most white label providers do not meet this core criteria. They choose instead to design services which encompass the broadest feature scope possible – they see their service as a ‘one stop shop’ intended to fulfill as many business needs as possible.
The problem for integrators with these ‘one stop shop’ services is they tend not to perform any one feature particularly well, which hampers its usefulness in a system made up of multiple white label services. Moreover, services which are bundled with functionality the integrator neither wants nor needs often suffer from configuration constraints, placing further limitations on their operability and connectivity with the outside world and with other white label services. Integrators pursue white label services that have taken the steps to ensure its service performs its core functions in a superior fashion.
When a white label service provider designs its service such that its focus is on a core competency, an integrator is likely to have greater success with the service when it is deployed within the context of a business system comprised of multiple white label services.
Design Solutions For Both Simplicity And Flexibility
Integrators look for white label service providers that do not try and second guess how they intend to use the service. Even if the provider believes they know the needs and expectations of a potential client or integrator, they should not design their white label service such that it imposes limitations on the way a service can be implemented within the context of a given business process or workflow. Integrators seek out white label providers who have designed services which are easy to integrate into a variety of business system configurations, and don’t impose unnecessary constraints on how the service can be deployed and configured.
Leverage Automation
To build successful systems from white label services, an integrator requires services which can operate with as much or as little human interaction as necessary given their business workflow process, thus allowing an integrator to pick and choose the degree of automation employed at each step of the process. Ideally, at any given process step, an integrator can choose to either:
- Have the service automatically pass control to another service or process, or
- Have the system notify an individual to handle the next step manually (via email, phone, text, instant message, etc.), or
- Programmatically determine whether control can be passed to the next automated process, or if human interaction is required.
Flexibility in programmatically driven automation is essential to the usefulness of a white label service to integrators, especially the ability for a human to take over a task when an automation step requires it.
Flexibility of Integration
An integrator building a system from multiple white label services requires services which provide a broad and comprehensive array of options for inter-connectivity. White label service providers not only need to design services which focus on how their software can be integrated with a company’s existing system, but also must also allow for automatic and seamless connectivity with external services. When a white label service fails to implement the functionality to communicate with external services, it compromises the ability of an integrator to design flexibility into, as well as to modify or enhance the functionality of, the overall system as business needs change and evolve.
Reliability of Service
Connecting disparate white label services that operate over the internet brings with it a downside for the integrator; if the system is too dependent on the availability of any one service in the system, any interruption in either the service or its network connection can bring the entire system to a halt.
Integrators need to take this into account when building a system of multiple white label services. The necessary steps must be taken to ensure there is redundancy in network services, and that systems are designed in a modular fashion allowing the service to be quickly replaced with another white label service as needed.
A system made up of multiple white label services working in unison will fail unless the integrator ensures that the system is designed to survive the failure of any service in the system as well as any aspect of network connectivity between the services.
With the accelerated rate of software advancement in today’s business world, white label services allow integrators to leveraging these advances freeing the company from the need to create and maintain their own in-house computer systems, and keep the focus on their own core competencies. Business system integrators have the knowledge and expertise needed to leverage these new software technologies. They can assemble and configure white label services into robust systems and, as the needs of the business evolve, implement changes quickly and with minimal disruption. White label services with the crucial specifications discussed in this article, are being utilized by integrators in new and innovative ways to drive the future of business systems development.