I never get tired of hearing my husband tell me he thinks I’m beautiful. Similarly, I never get tired of customers telling us why they chose Adeptia over our competition. As a marketer, I try to create compelling value propositions that appeal to a broad audience…so it’s always a good learning experience for me to find out what messages do and don’t resonate with individual customers who are on the receiving end. A recent conversation with a new customer about why we were chosen over a much larger, better-known competitor yielded a couple unexpected insights for two reasons:
The factors they list as having swayed their decision were capabilities we had thought commonplace in our competitors’ solutions. It just goes to show that not everyone delivers what they promise they will, and that it pays to look under the hood.The factors they list are so granular and specific…but this goes to show that when it comes to solving a problem, the devil is truly in the details.
Here are the 4 things I didn’t quite expect to hear when I asked a customer why they chose us over a competitor:
1. File Processing Capability
A major requirement for our customer was the capability of easily inserting (sometimes long) lists of files from FTP into databases. Using their previous solution, they had to process each file sequentially, which created anywhere from 5-10 additional steps along with .NET code injection. Adeptia’s solution allows files to be processed in parallel, which eliminates all the additional complexity and difficulty of sequential file processing.
2. Notification and Handling of Duplicate Records
It was also crucial to our customer that Database Insertion Errors were easy to see and respond to. Their previous solution did not have a way of separating out correct records and error records, so the process of erring out source records was somewhat of a nightmare. With Adeptia, however, customers are notified of duplicate records and guided into handling them with ease.
3. Looping Capability
As a result of rate limit policies which determine how much data an application can handle at once, our customer needed an integration tool with a mechanism for sequentially sending data in chunks instead of all-at-once. Their previous solution, however, didn’t have the orchestration architecture that allowed for this looping construct. They also lacked the ability to recover data automatically in the event of a connection failure. Not only is Adeptia’s solution built for session persistence to hold data during long transaction runtimes through looping implementation, it does so in a conversational way which responds to the recipient application and keeps the process consistent and secure.
4. Web Services Connection
It was absolutely vital for our customer to be able to connect and make calls to Web Services such as Nexus on a regular basis. Their previous solution didn’t have a construct in their process which could be used to propagate data needed for placing Web Service calls, and the resulting complex sequence of steps required the injecting of .NET code in order to make a connection. Adeptia’s solution eliminates the need for this, and this was, we were told, the ultimate turning point for why our customer chose us over our competitor.
These factors seem like table stakes to play in the integration game, but apparently not — some vendors SAY they can do them, but when it comes time to perform, their solution falls apart. And while we may tout our ability to empower business users to perform their own B2B integration tasks, what customers truly value will always be what it takes to solve their specific business problem. One thing is for sure: I’m never going to stop talking to customers…it’s always an education.
For more articles on Adeptia’s integration solutions, check out: