Nowadays, companies must have an enterprise integration solution in place to meet customer demand, outshine competitors, and enhance agility. This solution needs to effectively address ever-expanding integration requirements across various application, data, and ecosystem patterns. This is why an increasing number of companies are turning to Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) to harness its expansive integration capabilities.

TeamCentral provides one of the best iPaaS solutions on the market. TeamCentral is the next generation of automation technology, merging a no-code integration platform with a data quality management solution to synchronize data across multiple systems simultaneously.

Business Fortune sat down with Marc Johnson, the CEO and Co-Founder of TeamCentral, to have a conversation on the company’s incredible iPaaS solutions. The following are excerpts taken from the interview.

Q . How did TeamCentral start? How has the company grown since its foundation?

TeamCentral, Inc. was launched as a spin-off from Centric Consulting in 2022, but our flagship iPaaS platform has been in market for 6 years. Members of our team have actually been working together as business and IT consultants for more than 20 years. Fortunately CincyTech, a venture capital firm located in Cincinnati, worked with Centric to raise the initial capital we needed to branch out on our own to help companies solve an old persistent problem in a much better way.

Our team has decades of experience in helping companies implement and integrate enterprise applications like SAP, Salesforce, JD Edwards, Dynamics, and NetSuite, which has been extremely relevant when building out key aspects of the product like the embedded data model, metadata message engine, templatized connectors, and event-driven service bus in Central iPaaS. These are the “secret sauce” of our product and differentiate us from many others in the iPaaS market.

TeamCentral has grown by 300% since Q2 2023 and is expected to double by the end of this year. The main reason for the growth is that companies have embraced the “do more with less” approach to building technology solutions without a lot of complex custom development. Medium-sized companies, in particular, have big company problems with small company resource constraints when it comes to process automation and data quality management. They find our software and pricing a win-win.

Q . How does TeamCentral solve its clients’ problems through its iPaaS services?

Over the last 10 years, companies have increasingly embraced the concept of digital transformation. This was a novel concept a decade ago and is now a mainstream technology strategic initiative. Companies are now more interested in using the best SaaS solutions instead of depending on one big platform for all their business needs. New technologies and the increase in independent applications are causing a problem we call “Data Chaos” due to the growth of siloed business data. This is the problem TeamCentral was built to solve.

We first researched modern system integration and data management solutions, which included user-friendly tools like Zapier, Jitterbit, and Tray.io, as well as advanced solutions like Informatica and MuleSoft. We found that the low/no solutions looked nice but couldn’t handle the complex data use cases we were solving. The enterprise solutions could do most everything we needed but were just too expensive and required deeper technical expertise. We aimed to create a platform that was scalable, robust in features, and yet easy to implement without requiring developer-level technical expertise.

While we are industry agnostic, we have deep vertical alignment with manufacturing, construction/engineering, transportation/logistics, property management, and telecommunications. Our team has extensive experience in working with hybrid application environments and dealing with large amounts of data, most of which is in need of some re-structuring and cleansing. We can hand our product off with DIY documentation, or take more of a consultative approach to helping companies with limited resources migrate, cleanse and automate data synchronization.

Q . What are the advantages customers receive in choosing to do business with TeamCentral over its rivals?

Some of our customers like to use Central to automate themselves, but TeamCentral does provide a comprehensive service engagement if requested. This includes everything from discovery to build and deployment. Many other iPaaS companies defer to consulting partners for implementation work so the consistency in approach and cost to implement varies widely. Our pricing is reasonable and ongoing monitoring of the data synchronization after go-live is included with the licensing. TeamCentral aims to increase productivity, reduce wasteful spending, and empower internal resources, instead of expecting companies to have their own technical staff or hire consultants. We certainly don’t follow a traditional “buy a product and figure it out” approach.

The core team at TeamCentral mainly comes from a consulting background. Our team has experience in working with diverse clients and providing excellent customer service, which is important for attracting and keeping clients. We are enthusiastic about providing great customer service and truly understanding our clients’ specific needs in every interaction. We always prioritize our customers and aim to help them use our product as a tool for business growth and expansion. We are proud of our very low customer turnover rate, which we believe is due to our unique product and our commitment to service.

Q . What makes TeamCentral’s product the ‘central nervous system’ of any business? Can you explain to our readers why it makes TeamCentral’s offerings unique?

Central’s Event Driven Central’s Event Driven Architecture is based on a hub-and-spoke integration model, and some of our clients refer to that as their “Central nervous system.” We have built connectors for various software applications and data sources using APIs, webhooks, and file-based techniques. These connectors listen for data changes and communicate with the Central hub using our messaging engine and referential metadata. Connectors are like pre-defined data endpoints that can filter and transform data based on business rules for automating processes. Many connectors are connected to the Central hub. They all interact with the hub at the same time and send data to other connectors that are set up to receive that data. It is simple, efficient, flexible, highly scalable, and reliable. It is also relatively inexpensive to implement and maintain because NO CODE is required.

Some iPaaS solutions use a workflow to manage data, doing tasks like discovering, extracting, cleaning, transforming, enriching, verifying, and publishing it in steps or in batches. Others use real-time integration with database triggers or API calls, typically following a Star or Spaghetti Architecture. As the number of automations grows, they become brittle and burdened with technical debt, making them unwieldy.

Q . What are TeamCentral’s plans for the future?

Central has pre-built data connectors for over 50 different enterprise platforms and will expand the portfolio. Plug-and-play connectors integrate systems and automate data management more quickly than traditional API custom development. This means simple and repeatable deployment at a fraction of the effort and cost. Customers can even build their own connectors with our SDK, making Central versatile for home-grown system integration.

TeamCentral released our first round of business applications, which we call “Virtual Assistants” several years ago. Automated bots assist companies with sales, service, sourcing, financials, and providing a newsfeed. We are upgrading our virtual assistants to become business co-pilots using Artificial Intelligence LLMs, RAG, and vectorized data sources. This will bring advanced data search, maintenance, and task automation to the market. We have a deep understanding of the company’s data, so we can combine Open Data and research data like ZoomInfo with private business data to make predictions and recommendations.

Meet the CEO and the Co-founder

Marc Johnson is the CEO and Co-Founder of TeamCentral, Inc. He has over 20 years’ experience in designing and building systems and products across a number of different industries, including Financial Services, Utilities, Retail, and Manufacturing. Prior to launching TeamCentral Marc served in a number of senior architect and innovation leadership roles at Centric Consulting where he was responsible for advising and mentoring development teams as well as providing technology direction to Centric and clients. The experience Marc gained across the many customer interactions in his career became the inspiration for TeamCentral, where our low/no code solution is the foundation for our mission focused on employee and company productivity in an increasingly digitized business world.

“Central’s Event Driven Architecture is based on a hub-and-spoke integration model, and some of our clients refer to that as their “Central nervous system.”