An Ongoing Strategic Focus
Though business integration is usually associated with tight supply chain linkages, IaaS lets companies use SOAs to respond to customer needs quickly and efficiently regardless of underlying platforms and technologies. Enterprises in many verticals can use IaaS to build closer, more profitable relationships with customers, while saving time and reducing the costs of traditional business integration solutions. IaaS, a low-risk extension of SOA, delivers the tangible business benefits that elude many emerging technology solutions.

IaaS lets companies enable robust customer integration at the data and business process levels. With IaaS, a supplier can connect to virtually any customer using any procurement solution without forcing changes in data formats or business processes at the buying end. The essentials of the exchange - shopping cart, order, invoice, tracking numbers, etc. - are transformed by the integration service, and neither side needs to be concerned about the technology deployed by the other.

SIDEBAR:
SOA & Customer Integration in Action

The B2B division of a leading online and brick-and-mortar bookseller knew that it needed to significantly improve customer integration to grow sales. In a number of instances over the course of several years, field salespeople had called on large accounts who delivered the message loud and clear: your company makes it too difficult to do business with you.

Part of the problem was rooted in a lack of internal resources. The division's IT group had undertaken a few customer integration projects in the past but couldn't handle more work. Adding to the frustration, some of these projects were wasted effort, because the systems the group had so painstaking integrated disappeared from the market. IT knew that the company needed to work with customers whose technology was at varying levels of sophistication. Some customers had moved to Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs), which would make it significantly easier to exchange data, but many customers hadn't.

Given its resources and understanding of the work involved in integrating a disparate customer roster into its procurement system, IT decided to seek a solution outside the company. After a careful evaluation of the marketplace, the company chose Integration-as-a-Service (IaaS) because of its demonstrated ability to support large account business development and deliver cost savings. Decision makers were impressed by an easy-to-understand pricing model and rapid deployment as well as by their ability to amortize costs over a growing customer base.

In the months after deploying the IaaS solution, the company closed deals with most of the large accounts it targeted, automated nearly 95% of the orders, and dramatically improved the customer experience. In addition, the company retained 100% of all integrated customers that it onboarded.

IaaS has proven to be a strategic component in the retailer's positioning. It's boosted revenues by more than 20%, reduced the cost of integration by over 50%, and delivered a high degree of agility, which allows the company to respond to integration needs as business opportunities emerge.