Technical Criteria for Evaluating an Integration Vendor

Technical Criteria for Evaluating an Integration Vendor

Choosing a dedicated software for B2B integration can be a long-standing question that involves solving several technology integration problems. Organizations struggle in identifying the right vendor for their use case as innumerable players are already operating in this field. There is a huge proliferation of the variety of B2B integration solutions and organizations should make strategic considerations before making an investment.

Chief Technical Officers tasked with B2B modernization should evaluate their existing integration framework. This exercise presupposes an assessment of trading partners, business processes and technologies involved. The B2B integration tool should not only streamline the B2B processes but also support partner relationships and accelerate time to market.

B2B Integration for Driving Business Agility

Gartner estimates that by 2020 over 35% of B2B projects will collapse due to lack of vision and skilled resources.This will lead to frequent business disruptions and unmet service expectations. In a nutshell, organizations will be forced to take the help of integration vendors for modernizing their B2B framework. They will require B2B integration solutions for:

• Fulfilling a B2B/EDI request from their valued business partners.
• Modernizing application and streamlining B2B processes.
• Orchestrating chaotic and haphazard applications gained through mergers and acquisitions.
• Reducing the operational cost involved in B2B integration.
• Addressing pervasive integration needs between new and old technologies.

During B2B modernization, organizations face their toughest challenges in selecting the right vendor for their use case. Although some vendors have acquired high maturity level but many are still struggling to expand their solutions. That’s why organizations are facing tough decisions in selecting an end-to-end solution for their business case. Here are criteria for selecting an integration vendor:

Big Data and Data Warehousing: Big data and data integration is an emerging business requirement and delivers a competitive edge to businesses. An advanced integration tool should simplify data extraction from multiple sources and push it in backend systems for analytics purposes. It has become quintessential for an integration tool to support a wide variety of Big data requirements, i.e., Hadoop distributions, predictive modeling, Internet of Things (IoT), etc. and emergent environments.

Master Data Management (MDM) Initiatives: Master Data Management is another promising functionality needed in an advanced integration tool. Therefore, a modern integration solution should address the Master Data Management (MDM) Initiatives as well. An integration solution needs to build and ensure reusable connectivity between customers, products, and employees for effective master data management.

Database-level Consistency: Maintaining database-level consistency has become an intense challenge for organizations with the Internet of Things. Therefore, integration vendors should also focus on new functionalities to ensure database-level consistency across all applications.

Interenterprise Data Sharing: Organizations are required to send and receive data from trading partners and stakeholders. An integration tool should address this need with components for data transformation and data moment. This advantage ensures the smooth and disruption-free flow of data between interenterprise system.

Data Migration: Data migration involves a lot of variety of styles and techniques. A next-generation tool should simplify cloud to on-premise data migration in simple steps. When events demand, the tool should also monitor and audit data.

My name is John Scutz, I'm a digital strategist at Adeptia Inc.. I was born on January 1990 in Chicago. I contribute Adeptia efforts related to Blogs, Newsletters, Articles,