Challenge
A US enterprise-software provider moved orders and finance documents between its customers’ systems and NetSuite ERP. The exchange combined three eras of technology at once — SFTP file drops, SOAP services, and modern RESTlets behind OAuth 1.0 request signing. Transfers were semi-manual, failures surfaced only when a customer called, and every new customer onboarding meant hand-tuned scripts.
Approach
- Apache NiFi as the integration backbone — one production flow definition (a quarter of a million lines of JSON under version control) handling routing, validation, and transformation for every customer feed.
- Protocol bridging in one place: OAuth 1.0 signature generation for RESTlets, SOAP calls for the legacy surface, SFTP for partners that will never move — so each side speaks its native protocol and neither has to change.
- Idempotent, replayable processing — a failed batch re-runs without duplicating documents in the ERP.
- Alerting into the operations inbox with the failing record attached — triage starts from the email, not from log archaeology.
- Runbooks and automation scripts so routine operations (credential rotation, flow promotion, replay) don’t need the original author.
Result
- Zero manual re-keying between systems since go-live.
- Incidents shifted from customer-reported to alert-driven — caught in minutes.
- The provider onboards new customer integrations against a known, documented pattern.