I have not been as excited as I am today since I first founded Adeptia 15 years ago. Today, we implemented new features inside Adeptia Connect that are fresh, radical, and groundbreaking. We are going to drastically shorten and simplify the way businesses connect to and share information with each other.
How We Dreamed Up Adeptia Connect In The First Place
We were inspired to build Adeptia Connect by an existing customer of ours. This customer, a large re-insurer, had problems onboarding their customers — it took them several weeks to 3 months to bring on each new customer. Whenever they would bring on a new customer, they would need to set up a data connection to bring across information on that customer’s policies. It wasn’t just setting up the connection, though — it was also the fact that they had to take that information into their databases in a very specific way, requiring a data mapping exercise between each customer’s data fields and their own database. Can you imagine the problems they had recognizing revenue?
Solving Customer Data Onboarding
As a service provider, if you could start charging for your services as soon as you sold them, life would be dandy. But in reality, you’ve get to set up successful service delivery, and part of that set-up is to create a way for your customer to exchange data with you. Setting up that data connection and doing the mapping is not difficult per se — but it is time-consuming, and it is beyond the capability of most business users.
That means you guys in the IT department need to get involved. Unless you’re okay (which most IT departments are NOT) to provide your customer with either a secure tunnel into your on-premise application, or share login credentials into your cloud application, then you will need to find a workaround. The workaround is usually a secure FTP server connection, which requires you in IT– and your counterparts inside your customer — to sit down and agree upon a number of things to create a point-to-point connection (this is all detailed in my colleague’s blog post, Why B2B Integration Takes So Darned Long):
- 1.Subject of data being exchanged
- 2.Data format
- 3.Data fields
- 4.Data transport
- 5.Data consumption
- 6.Error handling and acknowledgements
And if you have more than one customer, you have to do this over and over, ad nauseum. It’s constantly reinventing the wheel! The worst part is, there’s no one else who can do this except you. Certainly not your business users.
But as of today, they can. Our latest release makes it possible for you to empower business users to create data onboarding connections with customers without having to know all the technical details above, or really have much technical knowledge at all. There are 3 special things about this latest release that I want you to know:
- 1.Better usability: I tested out our previous release with an outside firm who lined up business users to help us vet our usability. Let’s just say I wasn’t satisfied with the results. This new version of Adeptia Connect looks like an app store…we’ve pre-built a library of “connections” that you can pick and choose from. You can create a connection to another company as easily as logging into your Facebook or LinkedIn account.
- 2.Better control for IT: Just because we made it dirt-simple for business users to create data connections doesn’t mean we want them to go hog-wild. IT still needs to set up and manage this platform and maintain governance, control, and security. We even put in a secure engine so that you can run all of your connections on your own servers, if you want.
- 3.Better personalization: You can personalize Adeptia Connect with your own company’s logo, too, so that it will feel more familiar to your business users. For an additional charge, we can also white-label Adeptia Connect to you for your customers to use.
I really believe we have moved the ball much further with this new release — there is no other product like this in the market that provides this level of ease-of-use for business users and this level of control for IT. Want to try out the new Adeptia Connect? Be my guest.