Integration Service Providers
B2B Integration Service Providers Bring Expertise and Scale
If your company needs to exchange electronic messages or documents with only a few customers or partners, or if you have internal IT staff with strong integration expertise, you may not need to outsource your integration. However, as the size of our integration community grows or as the complexity and costs increase, it becomes much more efficient and beneficial to turn your B2B integration over to an experienced service provider. In addition to managing all areas of your integration, the leading service providers also offer increased security, non-repudiation, greater interoperability, and advanced business process support.
Top 10 Criteria When Evaluating Service Providers
Forrester Research, Gartner Inc and other industry analyst firms develop comprehensive reports and rankings of the leading B2B Service Providers. Below is a summarized list of some of the top criteria you should evaluate when choosing a B2B Service Provider:
1. Experience: How long has this provider been managing B2B integration processes? How many companies are currently using their solution and services? While you should not ignore newcomers to this space, you want to make sure the vendor is viable and has experience with companies and business processes similar to yours.
2. Customers: How many companies are they working with today and is their customer base continuing to grow? Are you able to talk to any current customers as a refernece? Do they have other companies from your same industry or with your same integration challenge?
3. Pricing: How do they charge for their services? Watch out for hidden fees or large buckets of fees that include big increases in your cost when you cross a certain number of connections or volume of transactions.
4. Current Offering and Product Roadmap: Does the current solution and services provide the capabilities you need today? Make sure you are not being promised functionality that only exists on a roadmap. For example, does the service provider support all the protocols and formats you need to integrate with your community? Do ask to see plans for future enhancements and new products, as you want to know how the solution will continue to improve over time.
5. Security: An integration service provider should ensure complete data and identity protection for your messages and information. You should evaluate security at many different levels – at the application layer, the infrastructure layer and the people/process layer. Does the vendor provide strong access control rules governing both your users and the managed services personnel when accessing your information. Plus, make sure there are clear rules around the data center, physical security and access. You should receive best-in-class security from your service provider.
6. Compliance: One of the best ways to validate the service provider’s level of security and operational control is by the compliance certificates the company holds. For example, is the service provider compliant to the SAS 70 Type 2 mandate? Do they maintain compliance to other industry leading mandates, such as PCI DSS? In addition, you need to make sure that your company is able to maintain compliance to your internal and external mandates when using the service provider’s solution.
7. Customer Support: What are the hours and communication channels to the provider’s customer support organization? Does the vendor have any reports it can share about response times or current support performance? Does the vendor track customer satisfaction? If yes, ask to see the results of the last customer sat survey. Make sure the vendor’s support organization is poised to help you when you need it.
8. SLAs: What standard SLAs does the vendor provide? Make sure these also meet your business and IT requirements. At the very least, the service provider should offer SLAs around reliability, support, response times, etc.
9. Hosted versus Multi-tenant Cloud Platform: While from a day-to-day delivery perspective, you may not experience any difference between a hosted or multi-tenant cloud platform. However, differences do start to appear when it comes to needing fast scalability for your integration transactions or connections. With a hosted solution, the provider is maintaining a dedicated instance for your B2B integration, so if your volume suddenly spikes, that infrastructure may be strained or even fail. With a multi-tenant architecture, the cloud platform can accommodate spikes in volume or message size more easily, resulting in greater reliability for your processes.
10. Infrastructure: While you are outsourcing your integration and removing the need for hardware and software on your premises, the service provider still is leveraging a traditional infrastructure to run its solution. Where is the vendor’s primary data center? If a cloud platform, is the solution running on the vendor’s own data center or are they leveraging a third-party cloud provider, such as Amazon Web Services? The infrastructure should be reliable, secure and highly scalable.