Years ago, the only way to share data between software solutions was to buy software with built-in integrations. If you wanted your lease software data to be visible in your maintenance, project management, or transaction management software, you needed to get all these tools from the same vendor.
In categories like Integrated Workplace Management Systems (IWMS) and Store Lifecycle Management (SLM), the connections between tools are essential for identifying cost savings and enabling advanced capabilities. And since point solutions didn’t have native integrations, it was difficult for them to offer comparable value to single-vendor platforms, which could build and support the exact integrations between their tools that customers needed.
This was the reality before Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) became table stakes for software solutions. APIs revolutionized the software industry by enabling developers to define how their tools would communicate with external software. With APIs allowing tools to communicate even if they’re from different vendors, today’s organizations can simply focus on selecting the best tool for the job, instead of worrying about whether it can interact with the rest of their tech stack. As long as there’s an API, there’s a path to the integrations you need.
At Tango, one of the ways we ensure our IWMS and SLM tools are best-in-class is by using APIs to support integrations with a constantly growing number of tools from other vendors. As new tools emerge and our customers come to us with piece-mealed tech stacks, APIs allow us to continue leveraging key data to facilitate workflows between tools.
But APIs aren’t right for every situation. Here’s why we give our customers multiple integration options—and why you may want to reconsider an API-only approach to connecting your tools.
APIs shift the burden of responsibility to the customer
Building and maintaining integrations takes work. And when those integrations happen through APIs, a lot of that work falls to you. Unless your organization has a surplus of dev resources you can easily allocate toward API integration, it’s worth evaluating the impact it’ll have on your budget and capacity.
Some APIs are easier to set up than others
While APIs are generally assumed to be pretty accessible, your experience varies widely depending on the vendor. Just because they offer an API doesn’t mean there’s a simple path to the integrations you need.
It’s kind of like ordering furniture online. Sometimes all the pieces and specialty tools arrive clearly labeled with detailed instructions and diagrams for every step, perhaps with a video guide and the option to have the company assemble the furniture for you—or at least talk you through the process. Other times, a company may simply send you the parts and assume it’s intuitive enough that you’ll understand how they all fit together.
The quality of a vendor’s API documentation and support dramatically changes their API’s accessibility. If an API guide is confusing or non-existent, your developers can easily spend hours on the phone struggling through the basic setup steps—assuming they even have phone support.
Tango provides detailed API instructions and expert support, but you can’t expect that from every vendor, and you shouldn’t assume that’s the experience you’ll have with an API.
Every update may mean more work for you
When vendors use APIs and API connectors to define how their tools can interact with others, they only have access to their own source code. Every time there’s an update to one of the tools you’ve integrated, it’s up to you to make sure it hasn’t broken yourconnection.
The latest version of your desk booking software might not be able to share reservation data with your space management or occupancy analytics solutions, leaving you with major gaps in your space utilization analysis. Your upcoming lease renewals may not show up in your real estate transaction management software. The longer these issues persist (or the longer it takes you to notice them), the greater the risk that you’ll make a wrong decision or miss an opportunity due to incomplete information.
Responding to updates may require changes to your API integration, or the connections may simply be broken until each vendor can prioritize your issue. And that leaves you caught in the middle of their two support teams, learning manual workarounds and submitting support tickets until it’s resolved.
Diversify your integration options with Tango
APIs are incredibly important. But they aren’t the only way to keep tools connected in meaningful ways. At Tango, we know that some of our customers don’t have the bandwidth to maintain API integrations, so we offer other standard integration options to the most common tools. We maintain these integrations on your behalf, so you’re never on the hook for fixing them if they break.
With a standard nightly integration, our software shares data with your other solutions every night. So for space planning workflows where it’s more important to have historical data than real-time information, you can get what you need without the hassle of being responsible for an API.
And of course, our suite of IWMS and SLC solutions come with native integrations we maintain as well. Since we have the source code for all of our software, part of every update for any of our tools involves carefully testing its impact on our integrations. So you’re less likely to encounter integration problems, and when novel situations arise, we have access to all the affected code to resolve issues quickly.
Want to learn more about how Tango’s solutions integrate with your tech stack?