Revolutionizing Data Products: Headless Data Integration and Who Can Benefit from It

Any company that makes a product whose aim is to generate insights from data can benefit from headless data integration. Regardless of whether the product is for sale on the market or just for internal company use, if it relies on integrations, headless should be a topic of interest.

In this article, we will talk about what headless data integration is, why it’s beneficial, and what types of companies stand to gain the most from it.

What Is Headless Data Integration?

Essentially, headless data integration is the building of a custom interface on top of an external, unified API that machine-automates all integrations.

Let’s give an example.

Say your company makes a customer data platform (CDP), which unites data from different sources to provide a comprehensive overview of customers. The main business of your platform is to generate insights on customers. But, in order to do this, it has to actually gather the data from all the different sources, which requires you to build and maintain integrations.

Building and maintaining integrations is a formidable challenge on its own. So formidable that, as the number of SaaS apps your customers use continues to increase, it probably won’t make sense for you to do it in-house. Adapting connectors to API changes, as well as fixing broken pipelines, will become a full-time job for a dozen or more data engineers.

It will be much more cost-effective for your company to put a separate integration engine, built and maintained by an entity that specializes exclusively in integrations, under the hood of your CDP. This would free the hands of your company’s engineers to focus on advancing the core functionality of your CDP itself, like developing machine-learning algorithms that help wrangle insights from data.

See the video below for a quick introduction to Dataddo’s headless data integration solution, or jump to a more technical explanation of headless data integration by our CEO, Petr Nemeth.

Who Is Headless Data Integration For?

In general, there are three main use cases for headless data integration.

Startups Wanting to Accelerate Time-to-Market for Data Products

Startups working to launch CDPs, platforms that generate marketing insights, AI tools that rely on analysis of data from different sources, and other data products are ideal beneficiaries of headless data integration solutions.

Their main challenge is to scale up quickly, because the more integrations they have, the wider the range of clients they can satisfy. 

But building these integrations requires a lot of engineering, and startups are notorious for lacking human resources, including in the data engineering department.

With a headless solution like Dataddo, all these companies have to do is connect their back end to our API, and pick the features/parts of our platform they want to embed.

This can significantly shorten the time-to-market for their products, and make future scaling easy.

Companies Selling Data Products That Are Becoming Hard to Scale

Well-established companies selling long-standing data products like CDPs and business intelligence platforms are also ideal beneficiaries of headless data integration.

In years past, data products were easier to maintain because the number of integrations needed to make them work properly was much smaller. Fewer apps, less data. Today, many companies with such products are struggling to keep up with the integrations (we’ve seen this firsthand). And it will only get worse.

The best solution for these companies will be to let a dedicated vendor handle the integrations, so they can focus their engineering efforts on building product functionality.

Enterprises with Proprietary Data Products for Internal Use

Enterprises with home-built data products that provide insights to internal teams typically have a lot to gain from headless data integration, for the same reasons listed above.

Getting all integrations from a single API will allow company engineers to focus on tailoring the interfaces of the products to serve the teams, and improve the consistency and reliability of the data they work with.

Dataddo’s Headless Integration Solution

When choosing Dataddo for headless data integration, you will have access to all functionality and connectors available within the Dataddo platform itself. Our platform is built on top of the same API that we offer to our customers, so it’s very easy to see how everything is implemented in a real-world context.

All API change management and pipeline maintenance is handled by us, and if you need a connector we don’t have, we’ll build it for free in about two weeks.