Recently my grandmother decided to try zip-lining for the first time. It resulted in a second hip surgery, but she had one heck of a ride.
Another time, we made the mistake of taking her to a waterpark with the kids. She wanted to follow them down a waterslide called “The Plunge,” and, despite our sincerest apprehensions, she would not be deterred. Oh, did she plunge. We spent 10 minutes holding up the ride while searching for her launched dentures at the bottom of the pool.
My grandmother is tenacious; she’d rather be in the middle of the action than on the sidelines. Although, to be fair, we did stop playing backyard football with her a few years ago after a rather unfortunate incident involving a botched linebacker blitz.
This is why I believe my grandmother could do business-to-business integration (B2Bi) if she set her mind to it. She’d hate having to wait around helplessly for IT assistance, so she’d try to take it into her own hands. And she could. All she needs is the right technology.
My grandmother is not, and will never be, a software developer. The only code she knows is the one for her garage door. But with the newest cloud-based integration technology, she doesn’t need technical skills in order to perform basic B2Bi.
In fact, anyone that’s comfortable using cloud-based consumer applications possesses the basic skills to integrate their own business applications with other companies.This is because B2Bi has evolved to the point where connections between cloud and on-premise applications between companies are now completely prepackaged and selectable. These prepackaged connections include preconfigured triggers, data mappings, data transfer methods and security for hundreds of B2Bi use cases including customer onboarding, data enrichment, cloud application backup, data aggregation, data synchronization, and supply chain automation.
The era of complex, IT-heavy B2Bi solutions is over. With how easy it has become, my grandmother can perform B2B integration and still have time to bake her famous sugar cream pies to bring to Burning Man.