Here’s a problem that will sound familiar to a lot of DBL shops: a large, multi-site organization runs its entire operation on a Synergy DBL application, handling everything from contracts and financial services to transactions and daily ops. Then corporate decides to bring in Salesforce and a third-party operations platform, and suddenly the DBL application needs to talk to both of them, in real time, across more than a dozen locations, around the clock.

That’s the kind of project that lands on Randy Tallent’s desk.

35 years deep in DBL

Randy has been building on the Synergy platform since 1990. He started as a developer writing management applications, then moved into IT leadership, then spent nearly 17 years designing BI systems and managing Oracle data warehouses for a large enterprise. He led a team of six across more than 20 applications. By the time he joined Synergex’s Professional Services Group (PSG) as a solutions architect in 2022, he had deep experience with how DBL applications are structured, how they scale, and how they fit into the larger enterprise data landscape.

That kind of background matters on a project like this. Every DBL application is different because every customer builds for  their specific business. But the patterns are similar. Randy’s years of working with ERP-style DBL applications meant he could walk into a complex codebase and quickly understand the data model, the business logic, and the integration points that need attention.

The challenge

The customer had grown through acquisitions, pulling several brands under one corporate umbrella. Leadership wanted consolidation: Salesforce for sales and marketing, a third-party platform for site-level operations. The DBL application had been the system of record for all of it. Now it needed to play nicely with both new platforms, feeding data in both directions and staying in sync in real time.

The project broke into two major workstreams. The first was integrating the DBL application with external financial service providers, keeping Synergy as the source of truth for contracts while data flowed to the new systems. The second was much bigger: migrating key data (contracts, members, transactions) into Salesforce and the operations platform, then standing up a live two-way integration so everything stayed in sync from that point forward.

Working across teams

Randy worked alongside the customer’s Salesforce team, the third-party vendor, and operations staff at every site. The customer set the timelines and the architectural direction, and Randy and team had eight months to prepare. When the Salesforce team changed their data format requirements late in the game, right before the cutover, the PSG team adapted and kept things on track.

A Big Bang

A phased migration would have meant building throwaway integrations at every step, so the team did what most people would talk themselves out of: they migrated everything at once. Randy, accompanied by a developer and a PM/QA lead, went on site and pulled an 80-hour week to make it happen.

“We built a migration and a real-time integration, tested it, and cut over an entire enterprise in a single week,” Randy says. “You don’t get a second shot at something like that.”

The pipeline ran on Azure. Randy’s team extracted data from the DBL application into CSVs, pushed them to the cloud, used Azure Data Factory to populate staging tables in SQL Server, then transformed everything into the formats Salesforce and the operations platform needed. At every step, reconciliation reports verified the counts to make sure nothing got dropped, and the whole migration ran for over 24 hours.

Building a real-time integration engine with DBL at the core

The migration got the data where it needed to go, but the integration is what keeps it there. The third-party platform publishes events whenever a transaction is created, modified, or cancelled, and Randy built an Azure-based event application on Linux that subscribes to that queue using a pattern similar to Kafka. Events arrive, drop into a custom engine that sequences processing, call back to the external platform for the full JSON payload, and then hand off to the Synergy DBL back end via xfServerPlus.

 xfServerPlus let the team expose DBL business logic as callable methods that the Azure event engine could hit over the network, with no rewrite and no rip-and-replace required. (Applications not already using xfServerPlus would likely use Synergex’s newer technologies like Harmony Core web services framework to implement integrations like this.)

“The DBL application didn’t need to be replaced. It needed to be connected,” Randy says. “We just had to build the bridge.”

That bridge now runs around the clock across more than a dozen sites, processing transactions, status changes, and updates in real time. Randy engineered it to be bulletproof with utilities for monitoring traffic, tracking errors, and retriggering anything that fails. The result is roughly 99% uptime.

“I didn’t want 3 AM phone calls, so I built a system where every event is tracked, every error is retriggerable, and nothing gets lost,” Randy says. “That’s how you sleep at night when you’re running a 24/7 integration across a dozen sites.”

Keeping two systems in sync

Anyone who has run a two-way integration knows the migration is the easy part. Keeping things in sync over time is where the real engineering challenge lives. If the external platform says four units are available and the DBL application says three, that mismatch rolls downhill fast and site-level staff end up sorting it out by hand. The external vendor has also been known to add new configuration or transaction categories without a heads-up. If those aren’t mapped on the Synergy side, the event engine catches them, but someone still has to do the detective work.

Randy built the system with exactly that scenario in mind. Every event is logged and nothing is purged, so if something goes sideways, the team can trace it back to the exact event and payload that caused the problem.

What this means for DBL customers

Randy’s project is more proof that a DBL application isn’t a barrier to modernization, it’s a foundation you can build on. Randy and team turned a legacy system of record into a fully integrated node in a modern, cloud-connected enterprise. The business logic and the data stayed right where they were, and everything else got connected around them.

That’s what you can do with Synergex technologies and services. If you need to integrate your DBL application with Salesforce, stand up real-time data pipelines to the cloud, or connect to third-party platforms you did or didn’t choose, we’ve got the tools and technical experts to help you make that happen. And with solutions architects like Randy, who bring decades of hands-on DBL experience to every engagement, your application stays at the center of the solution, right where it belongs.