If you’re riding the wave of cloud innovation with the rest of the enterprise world, I’ve got good news for you. The next iteration of cloud innovation has arrived. Business-to-business, cloud-to-cloud integration is now more than a possibility.
When your client asks you for an update using inventory data from a cloud application, say, Netsuite, you’ve previously had to wring your hands and wait for IT to access and extract the data you need. Up until recently, businesses wanting to connect to each other’s cloud applications faced a frustrating obstacle. Enabling an existing enterprise service bus to handle data connections with a client’s cloud applications was an incredibly difficult process.
Traditionally, B2B integration used complex custom code to connect on-premise applications. This dinosaur model was architectured for internal systems and did not allow for connection to the cloud. Old integration-platform-as-a-service (iPaas) solutions were point-to-point or app-to-app centric and did not have the “network” approach of inviting other companies into the network for a connection.
The days of dealing with this frustration is over; we have entered the age of B2B cloud-to-cloud integration. There are now innovative solutions which are architectured with a flexible framework that allows businesses to publish connections for their clients to be able to automate data exchange.
This cloud integration framework is a generation ahead of the existing code-based platforms offered by most integration solutions. With proper security permissions set up under the auspices of IT, business users can publish an application connection (similar to apps available in app stores) that companies can use to connect with their clients in the cloud.
Now, if a client asks for updated payroll data with employee work schedules currently stored in Workday, the average business user won’t have any problem doing this.
Say goodbye to code-centric development platforms and hello to rich graphical interfaces that enable business users to create secure connections with their trading partners. With the newest innovations in cloud integration, IT can empower business users to perform self-service integration.
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