API Integrations

Most businesses run on more than one piece of software. The problem is that most of those tools were not built to talk to each other. So data gets copied manually, reports go out of sync, and your team spends hours every week doing work that software should be doing automatically.

API integrations fix this. They create reliable connections between your systems so data moves automatically, operations stay in sync, and your team can focus on work that actually requires human judgment.

We build integrations designed around how your business actually operates, not generic connectors that almost fit. Whether you are connecting internal platforms, linking to third-party tools, or building the plumbing between a new and legacy system, we handle the full build... mapping, development, testing, and ongoing maintenance.

As businesses grow, they add more applications, more data sources, and more external partners. Without the right connections, this creates data silos, repeated manual work, and costly errors that compound over time.

Strong API integrations solve these issues at the root.

They create consistent data flow, speed up daily operations, and give you the flexibility to add new tools or partners without rebuilding what already works.

SWARECO's API integration services cover the platforms our clients actually run on: Salesforce and HubSpot for CRM and marketing data, Shopify for commerce, and NetSuite for finance and ERP. Those four cover most of what we are asked to connect, and each has its own idea of how an application programming interface should behave — Salesforce governor limits, HubSpot's per-portal rate limits, Shopify's bulk operations and webhook topics, NetSuite's SuiteTalk and SuiteQL. Knowing the specific quirk before the build starts is the difference between a two-week integration and a two-month one.

What we build with

Integration work runs on Ruby on Rails with Sidekiq for background jobs and retries, PostgreSQL for the mapping and audit tables, and Redis for queues and idempotency keys. Docker containers on AWS or Heroku keep environments identical, and Playwright covers the user-facing flows that depend on an integration completing. Where search is involved we use Elasticsearch or OpenSearch rather than pushing the load into the database.

How we build it

Every integration starts with a data map rather than code. We write down which system owns each field, what happens when both change the same record, and what the integration should do when one side is unavailable. Most API integration failures are not bugs - they are two systems that were never told which of them is right, and the map is where that gets decided.

Then we agree on the direction of travel. A one-way push is far cheaper to build and to reason about than a two-way sync, and a surprising number of requirements described as "keep them in sync" are satisfied by a push in one direction plus a read in the other. Where a genuine two-way data integration is required we say so, and we scope the conflict-resolution rules as part of the work rather than discovering them in production.

Build follows the mapping, and the integration process looks like ordinary API development done carefully. Which type of API a platform exposes - REST, GraphQL or an older SOAP service - shapes the build, but the habits of modern integration hold everywhere: we prefer webhooks over polling where the platform supports them, and handle authentication properly - OAuth token refresh, rotating secrets, and per-environment API keys, so nothing depends on one person's credentials. Rate limits are designed for rather than discovered: requests are queued and backed off, and bulk operations use the platform's batch API endpoints where they exist.

Then the parts that decide whether an integration survives its first year. Every operation is idempotent, so a retry cannot create a duplicate record. Failed jobs are retried with backoff and, if they still fail, land somewhere a human will see them. Every run logs what it touched. And there is an alert when a sync stops entirely, because the failure mode that costs real money is the silent one that nobody notices for a week.

We also tell you when not to build. If a supported native connector or an integration platform as a service - MuleSoft, Boomi, Workato and their peers - does the job, that is cheaper than any custom API integration services we could quote, and we will say so up front. Custom API integration work earns its cost when the logic is specific to your business, the volume is beyond what those platforms price sensibly, or the systems involved have no connector worth trusting. Either way, you get a scoped integration project with a fixed data map, not an open-ended retainer.

Examples of API integration we deliver most often

The most common API integration use cases we are asked for: CRM-to-ERP application integration for customer and order sync, ecommerce order flow from Shopify into NetSuite, marketing data integration between HubSpot and a product database, and internal dashboards that need one API layer over several systems. The benefits of API integration in each case are the same — one source of truth per field, no re-keying, and reporting that does not need three exports to answer one question. That is what well-built API integration services enable, and it is measurable in hours of manual work that disappear.

API management, gateways and secure APIs

Where several consumers need the same data, we put a unified API in front of it rather than wiring point-to-point: one documented RESTful API layer with authentication, rate limiting and versioning, which is API management at the scale most mid-sized companies actually need. If you already run an API gateway or an API management platform — Azure API Management, IBM API Management, Oracle Integration Cloud — SWARECO builds to its policies instead of around them. Every secure API we ship uses OAuth or scoped API keys, validates inbound payloads, and comes with API documentation the next developer can work from. The same applies to cloud integration between SaaS tools and to older SOAP web services: the api strategy is decided once, in the data map, and enforced in code.

Connecting to a legacy system with no API

Plenty of the systems that most need integrating do not expose an API. The options, in order of preference, are a supported export we can schedule, direct read-only database access, a thin API we build in front of the legacy application, or file exchange over SFTP where nothing better exists. We will tell you which of those your system actually supports before promising a real-time integration, because "real time" against a nightly batch export is a claim that cannot be met.

The cost of API integration, and what happens after it ships

The cost of API integration is driven by the number of systems, the direction of data flow, and how much conflict-resolution logic the data map uncovers — a one-way push between two well-documented platforms is days of work, a two-way sync across three systems with a legacy component is a project. An integration is also a long-lived dependency on somebody else's product, and third-party APIs change on their own schedule. We keep connectors modular so a breaking change on one service is a contained fix rather than a rebuild, watch vendor deprecation notices for the platforms we have connected, and hold the monitoring that tells you a sync has stopped. Where you would rather own it, the handover includes the data map, the runbook and the alerting, not just the repository.