What is WHIP?

The Work Horse Integration Platform, or WHIP, is our proprietary space where servers, networks, and applications all reside to enable custom software integration and business process automation. We designed this technology to facilitate seamless, cost-effective application integration for small to large organizations. Work Horse accomplishes this by using MuleSoft Anypoint, which is the top provider for APIs (Application Programming Interface) and software integration. By using a DevOps approach to software management, we ensure your apps are highly scalable and reliable.

Connecting your organization’s disparate, stand-alone applications into a centralized software system allows the instant sharing of critical company, customer, and partner data across silos and departments. Among other benefits, this automates routine, manual tasks, simplifies complicated workflows, and reduces bottlenecks, errors, and data loss. WHIP also enables Work Horse and its clients to easily monitor the performance and maintenance needs of your integrated apps. This diagram provides a visual overview of WHIP.

Shared & Dedicated Software Integration Platforms

Work Horse offers two types of software integration options: shared platforms and dedicated platforms. A shared platform can be used at once by multiple customers with average software user and network traffic, without any detriment to speed, security or performance. A shared software integration platform provides key components of a dedicated platform, including servers, networks, and applications. The advantage is that clients split the platform’s cost. This enterprise-level offering is an attractive, affordable solution for small and middle-market businesses.

A dedicated platform is reserved for a single organization. It’s an ideal solution for companies that require more bandwidth to manage a high volume of application user and network traffic. By isolating data and processes to its own servers, networks, and software, a dedicated platform provides the ultimate option for large enterprise clients.

For both shared and dedicated platform solutions, we create an individualized dashboard for your organization to monitor software integrations and manage alerts and notifications.

What Our Custom Application Integration Platform Can Do

Here are just a few examples of how integrating your software applications with WHIP can benefit your company. Start by imagining the manual, repetitive tasks performed every day, week or month. Think about the extra time and money that costs, the room it allows for human slowdowns and errors… and how you could redirect staff resources to higher-level tasks if these things were automated. Then consider what it would mean to improve internal and external customer experience with instant access to current data and faster delivery times.

• Run automated processes that can be scheduled at specific times or every so often.
• Run a job every Tuesday and Thursday at 11:00 am and 8:00 pm, for example, or on any other day/s and at any other time/s.
• Run a job every day at the top of every hour.
• Run a job every 15 minutes, every four hours or in any other increment.
• Provide real-time access to your data and business processes to internal teams or external clients and business partners.
• Work with hundreds of technologies and thousands of applications to integrate modern and legacy systems.
• Automate your processes for more consistent operations and to decrease overall processing time and eliminate tedious staff tasks.
• Bundle multiple use cases into a single application, which means that only one subscription is needed for many use cases.

What Makes Our Application Integration Platform Better

When you leave the complexity of integrating your software applications to Work Horse, you’re in the hands of experts. We provide individualized guidance and development for networking the applications and software systems that run your business. Work Horse professionals are certified software architects and developers that lead every technical aspect of the platform development cycle. We build error handling and testing right into our platform so we’re prepared for any challenge and every success. WHIP features enterprise-grade functionality at a reasonable price for small and midsize businesses.

• Utilize a software integration service that large organizations have implemented to support critical systems.
• Access platform design, development, and support tools that meet the industry’s best-in-class standards.
• Make your business more reliable, consistent, and efficient with our robust software platform functionality. 
• Monitor your integrated applications on your own time through WHIP’s custom dashboard. 
• See transactions and errors in real-time to evaluate the performance of your software systems.
• View historical data to determine trends and forecast needs.
• Provide functional and technical documentation to your business partners.
• Automate business processes by enabling customers and vendors to send and receive data. For example, a customer can send an order automatically through your WHIP platform for fulfillment.
• Share our API documentation and data with other developers with minimal need for intervention.

The WHIP Development, Testing & Deployment Process

Your Work Horse software integration platform development begins after your requirements are defined and our proposal is accepted. The amount of time it takes to develop, test, and deploy WHIP depends on the functionality and bandwidth your company needs for each use case. We generally have a minimum turnaround time of two weeks, but the complete process could take several weeks for more sophisticated custom builds. The following process repeats for each use case:

1. You contact us to help define your integration and automation requirements.
2. We provide a proposal for your use cases and help determine whether the shared platform or dedicated platform is best.
3. You approve the proposal, which turns into a project.
4. We design and develop the application, configure WHIP for each specific use, then deploy the application into the test environment.
5. We test the application, then work with you to determine a go-live date.
6. The application is deployed to the production environment.
7. We register your company as a WHIP subscriber, and the monthly billing cycle begins.
8. We invoice you for the custom platform development, testing, and deployment work performed.
9. You utilize our Support Portal to communicate any changes or issues or to request that Work Horse develop new functionality.
10. You monitor the custom-built dashboard that displays vital information about your application integration environment.