Integration Architecture
Making systems that were never designed to talk to each other work together reliably, securely, and predictably.
Integration architecture is where the complexity hides. It started with working out how SAP, PI, and Active Directory quietly depended on one another, and grew into designing integration strategies across SAP S/4HANA, Documentum, IoT, laboratory systems, and cloud connectors.
Most of the work is dependency mapping: trusted subsystem connections, DNS, certificates, message queues. The rest is designing and reviewing the things that carry data between systems, whether that's an API, an SFTP drop, or a queue nobody has looked at since the day it was built. On the industrial side that means OT/IT integration for SCADA, PI, the chromatography lab, and fiscal metering. On the cloud side, site-to-site VPN redundancy and hybrid foundations. Vendors get assessed against a written checklist, because the alternative is trusting a slide deck.
No platform operates alone, and the chain is longer than it looks. A metering system depends on PI, which depends on network reliability, which depends on identity, which depends on governance. When the fiscal metering review came round in 2024, the hard part was never the interface. It was tracing a single business requirement back through four systems that had each been designed by someone who didn't know the other three existed.