2011 Prediction: B2B Becomes Business Critical
Posted by Margaret Dawson on February 7, 2011
In the ongoing deep dive into my five predictions for 2011 around the cloud and integration, let’s look at my forecast around B2B integration. I’ll admit that this prediction appears completely self-serving, since Hubspan is in the B2B integration space, but honestly, I am just one of many pundits foreseeing a move of B2B to the front burner.
Why is B2B finally becoming sexy? It’s the culmination of many things. For one, while EDI is alive and well in spite of being a decades old approach to integration, companies need more agility and leverage of key applications. Businesses can no longer mandate that suppliers must send electronic documents in a specified format; it’s become too expensive and complex. Add increased global collaboration and what I call the “borderless enterprise”, and you have a community of organizations that need to work together across disparate systems, business rules and processes.
Add to this cloud computing, which is on the rise, and you have the perfect storm (no pun intended). Cloud-based integration alleviates the need for any company in a B2B integration community to add more software or hardware. The cloud is a natural mediator, allowing all businesses to send information to the cloud however and whenever they want. Plus, B2B technology has come a long way since the early EDI days, and today’s solutions operate more at the business process layer than the data level. B2B integration providers are also moving toward a future of cloud service brokerage, which Gartner’s Benoit Lheureux proclaims is the future direction of cloud integration. Check out Ben’s predictions for B2B integration and cloud brokers.
On a similar note, Charlie Babcock of InformationWeek recently wrote an article called “Integration in the Cloud, the Sleeper Issue.” What Charlie, Ben and others in the industry are illustrating is that B2B integration is quickly evolving to become a critical part of an organization’s overall IT and business strategy. Enterprises are focusing less on moving static documents from one point or company to another, and more on streamlining business processes across and between companies.
Not only is B2B integration expanding and becoming more important, but this year we’ll continue to see a further blending of integration with related technologies and approaches, such as application integration, business intelligence, business process management (BPM), service oriented architecture (SOA), and other synergistic technology areas. What’s more, companies will demand greater leverage of legacy and new ERP investments to automate business processes and exchange information in real-time with business communities.
Another thing to keep in mind is that increased collaboration will also drive the demand for B2B scalability. To meet the needs of customers, vendors will need to take a closer look at increasing capabilities to handle complex message processing and increases in transactional volume.
As companies become less vertically integrated and more horizontally distributed, B2B integration will take on a new found importance within IT organizations. And as a result, B2B integration will no longer be a “nice to have,” but a “must have” component of your business and IT strategy.
Tags: B2B Cloud Integration, B2B Integration, Cloud Computing, Cloud Services Broker, Gartner Benoit Lheureux
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