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SAP S/4HANA Transition: What’s the Rush?

Posted on November 2, 2022 by - Cloud Migration, Enterprise Integration Solutions, IT, SAP

It’s been two years since SAP announced it would sunset support for its on-premise ERP. There are five years until the current deadline. In business terms, five years seems like a comfortable window for change – in the technology world, five years is practically an eternity. With what seems like all the time in the world to migrate, is starting your SAP S/4HANA transition really that urgent?

The short answer: Yes.

The longer answer: Seriously, what are you waiting for? There are several reasons not to put off an SAP S/4HANA migration, no matter how daunting it may seem.

>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business. 

Other Systems Depend on It

Any unanticipated shift to a new technological system is a challenge. But your ERP isn’t just any old system. It’s a core system with many dependencies. You’ll need to examine the relationship between SAP and each solution or tool it interacts with before you can make the move. 

Data migration is a crucial factor to consider when evaluating your SAP S/4HANA integration options. Overlooking a dependency before your migration begins can result in data loss and significant disruptions to your operations. Starting your S/4HANA transition now ensures you have as much time as possible to examine and address dependencies in your system.

Sometimes Things Go Wrong

Your SAP modernization efforts may well be your organization’s first real foray into the world of cloud, and preparing for the worst (while hoping for the best) is the smart move. 

Even if your company has already embraced cloud-based solutions for other aspects of your business, it’s never wise to assume that everything will go exactly as planned. Something as simple as a lack of stakeholder alignment on the goals and priorities for your SAP S/4HANA transition can derail the entire process. The responsible move is to begin planning for the shift while the old system is still there as a reliable backup.

S/4HANA Migration has Benefits

It’s easy to think that your SAP S/4HANA transition is a massive evil task you’re being forced to undertake against your will. But migration can serve as a catalyst for your digital transformation journey and transform your ERP into a more strategic partner for other lines of business. 

It can:

  • Unlock potential for cost savings
  • Reduce technical debt
  • Improve efficiency
  • Empower your team to innovate

Do you really want to delay that?

Simplify Your SAP S/4HANA Transition

Recognizing the benefits of moving forward now with your SAP S/4HANA migration doesn’t mean that all the challenges associated with doing so will simply vanish into thin air. Still, there are ways to simplify the process.

1. Learn from those who’ve already made the move

  • You’re developing a strategy for SAP modernization; you’re not reinventing the wheel. S/4HANA didn’t just appear when SAP announced its 2027 ECC sunset date. Plenty of companies – some with more complicated dependencies or niche legacy systems than you – have already made the transition. Learn from their experiences, mistakes, and successes as you develop your SAP S/4HANA roadmap.

2. Take time to inventory and understand your environment

  • One of the major arguments for mapping your journey to SAP S/4HANA now is that you’ll have more time to get things right. Every single system touching your on-premises ERP may also need modernization. Invest time in documenting systems and their dependencies, and carefully determine:
    • What should be modernized as part of your migration
    • What you can “lift and shift” for modernization in the future
    • What can be eliminated or streamlined for greater efficiency

3. Find or build an SAP S/4HANA roadmap

  • Digital transformation isn’t a destination – it’s a journey. And there are plenty of guides available to help make the transition more manageable and less disruptive if you’re ready to ask for help.
  • Find an existing framework or process with a proven record of success that will serve as a roadmap for your SAP S/4HANA transition, or partner with a vendor that has already completed the journey before and knows what to watch out for.

Choose Digibee for SAP Modernization

Available-on-SAP-Store-imageDigibee’s low-code iPaaS can help simplify and accelerate your S/4HANA transition. We empower you to implement integrations 40% faster to decrease costs, reduce disruptions, reduce technical debt, and completely eliminate downtime. We’ve helped many organizations develop an SAP ECC to S/4HANA roadmap that works for them, and we’re proud to be a featured vendor in the SAP Store.

Download your copy of Digibee’s 6-step process to de-risk and speed up your SAP S/4HANA Migration to learn how to make your migration easy and risk-free.

For more information, visit our SAP resource page.

Financial Services: What are the Top Cloud Migration Challenges You Must Overcome?

Posted on October 28, 2022 by - Cloud Migration, IT

Shifting from on-premises to a cloud environment delivers significant efficiencies for your financial services organization, allowing you to tap into important innovations and improvements such as automation, process support, stronger security, and the elimination of aging datacenters.

Yet, according to a recent McKinsey survey, cloud adoption in the financial services sector remains at a very early stage, with only 13% of organizations having half or more of their IT footprint in the cloud.

Fortunately, the industry isn’t letting the grass grow under its feet, with 54% of respondents expecting to shift at least half their workloads to the public cloud over the next five years.

But getting to the cloud isn’t always easy. This article will help you mitigate–and even avoid–many of the challenges your financial services organization may encounter, ensuring a smooth transition with minimal disruptions to the business.

>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business. 

1. Performance

Cloud environment performance is key to maintaining continuity and minimizing disruptions such as IT downtime that impact the business. Cloud performance issues are often due to availability, network latency, or application processing delays.

How to do it right

Before your migration process begins, it’s essential to:

  • Identify which applications are best suited to cloud migration
  • Understand application dependencies
  • Make a plan for what you will migrate and when
  • Become familiar with cloud integration platforms as they will allow for ideal performance

Make migration decisions based on data flows or business domains – not on which systems provide or receive data. Select technology that delivers the flexibility to migrate what needs migrating and keep other systems in place.

Decoupling data streams in completely isolated containers allows for both vertical and horizontal tuning. This model lets you optimize traffic between points, removing the performance constraints typically associated with cloud migration and putting the focus of analysis on endpoint capacity.

2. Cost Management

Cloud costs are climbing rapidly for many financial services organizations, with banks estimated to waste as much as 35% of cloud spending on inefficient activities. It’s vital to carefully manage costs, factoring in the duration and complexity of your transition to ensure a solid return on your investment.

How to do it right

There are a few ways to control the price of a shift to the cloud:

  • Establish a cost management checklist to follow whenever you deploy new services
  • Base all organizational cloud usage on your company’s financial policies
  • Budget specific amounts for different projects, departments, or categories and review regularly to ensure you’re on track
  • Utilize cost reporting tools from vendors or third parties to ensure consistency

A platform-as-a-service model eliminates the need for upfront infrastructure investments and allows costs to be adjusted to match project scope without compromising the agility or scalability of your solution. 

And while traditional cloud vendor tools focus solely on the transition, a cloud-based enterprise integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) can simplify your cloud migration process while also laying the groundwork for architecture modernization to support future efficiencies.

3. Governance

Financial services organizations face much greater scrutiny and regulatory oversight than many other sectors. The industry requires protocols for controls, processes, and documentation that meet strict guidelines. 

Provisioning, infrastructure delivery, and operations are major challenges associated with cloud computing and the complexity involved in properly implementing, using, controlling, and maintaining IT assets. 

Traditional governance models must be adapted to new environments to enhance security, manage risk, and avoid problems such as:

  • Poor integration between cloud systems
  • Data or effort duplication
  • System and business goals unaligned
  • Inefficient use or resources

How to do it right

  • Ensure reuse and access standardization to systems, data, and business flows
  • Keep cloud usage standards consistent with organizational and financial services regulations / compliance requirements
  • Align cloud strategy with overall business and IT strategies to ensure cloud systems provide quantifiable support for business objectives
  • Maintain clear agreements between all stakeholders so resources are used and shared appropriately
  • Implement changes in a consistent, standardized manner
  • Rely on monitoring and automation for dynamic event response

4. Operations Management

The problem of shadow IT and the unnecessary use of resources reduces operational efficiency and security while driving up costs. Robust cloud operations management helps overcome some cloud migration challenges. Service level agreements define expected performance levels, but continual monitoring is necessary to ensure SLAs are upheld as infrastructure components change. 

Processes and checks must be implemented in alignment with industry and corporate standards before code is deployed to production, and security requirements and access controls must be in place.

How to do it right

  • Active monitoring with execution control, error handling, and reprocessing rules
  • Easy-to-use dashboard
  • Logging and alert capabilities
  • API management support for the creation, security, management, and sharing of APIs
  • Ability to interact with existing ITSM tools to send logs, events, and metrics to central monitoring, email addresses, or messaging applications

5. Observability

Observability enables administrators to gather internal and external data on networked resources to monitor and understand their behavior, investigate anomalies, and improve performance and uptime. 

But this can be challenging in a cloud environment, especially given the massive volume of data and components in cloud architecture. In fact, 75% of CISOs within financial services organizations say vulnerability management has become more difficult as the need to accelerate digital transformation has increased.

How to do it right

Make sure the observability tools you select support:

  • Integration with existing tools and support for necessary frameworks and languages
  • User-friendly interfaces to ensure they are used correctly and regularly
  • Real-time insights through dashboards, reports, and queries so teams can quickly understand issues and their impacts
  • Support for modern event handling and context techniques
  • Visual presentation for rapid comprehension and action

6. Security

According to VMWare, in the first half of 2020, we saw an increase of 238% in cyberattacks targeting financial institutions. This frightening statistic emphasizes the need to ensure controls and practices that are in place for on-premises systems are adequate–or are replaced–to meet the requirements of cloud-based systems. Failure to support this transition could introduce new risks to your operation:

  • Increased attack surface (public cloud has become a large, attractive target for cybercriminals) 
  • Insecure interfaces and APIs
  • Lack of visibility and tracking, which can lead to reduced protections
  • Workload flexibility – traditional tools can’t handle dynamic environments
  • DevOps, DevSecOps, and automation, as well as appropriate controls must be identified early in the development cycle to avoid security gaps or delays
  • Granular permissions and keys management, which can provide the wrong users dangerously high access levels
  • Complex environments made up of public cloud, private cloud, on-premises deployments, and edge protection

How to do it right

Mission-critical resources must be deployed in logically isolated areas, and dedicated WAN links and enterprise-defined static routing configurations used to customize access to devices, networks, gateways, and public IP addresses.

Secure all distributed cloud applications and automatically update WAF rules when there is a measurable change in traffic. Be sure to apply and enforce all financial services security policies and processes consistently.

Employ encryption at every level of data transport, and deploy software that detects, identifies, and remediates threats in real-time.

Avoid Cloud Migration Challenges with Digibee

Digibee’s unique cloud native enterprise iPaaS model helps minimize the risks of these common cloud migration challenges that disrupt migration and architecture modernization processes, ensuring that your digital transformation is smooth and seamless. Our solution isn’t just about moving your data and processes to the cloud. Digibee helps future-proof your financial services operation so you’re ready for anything – including competing in a digital-first world.

Want to learn more about how your financial services organization can overcome cloud migration challenges with Digibee’s iPaaS solution? Request a demo with our team now for more information.

Accelerated Integration – How Your Enterprise Organization Can Efficiently Integrate Systems

Posted on October 26, 2022 by - Enterprise Integration Solutions, IT

The idea of system and data integration has reached an inflection point. Most companies have acknowledged the critical role embracing a modern integrated architecture plays in their plans for digital transformation. But relatively few have successfully acted on that understanding.

Data in the State of Enterprise Integration Report suggests that 71% of enterprises are actively planning to adopt, supplement, or replace their integration technology. The Gartner Integration Maturity Model notes that many IT departments are still only in the very early stages of developing integration competency – if they’ve started at all.

Adopting the right iPaaS early could give enterprises a technological edge over their competitors. So how do organizations accelerate integration to align their progress with its importance? 

>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business. 

Why the Need for Accelerated Integration?

The Gartner maturity assessment suggests that approximately 30% of organizations are only getting started with integration, with a significant percentage of those at a point where they have not recognized the value of a comprehensive integration strategy.

Why bother with integration? Does it really matter? The short answer: Yes, it really does.

Poor integrations – or a lack of integration altogether – has a range of measurable, negative impacts on business. We gathered data from more than 1,000 CIOs and system architects, and the most commonly cited effects of a lack of integration included:

  • Inability to adopt new practices and technologies that support growth (48%)
  • Inefficiencies that directly affect business success (48%)
  • Lack of ability to respond to market changes in a timely manner (40%)
  • Wasted resources as IT departments focus on maintenance and low-value tasks (37%)

All these responses support the understanding that data integration issues are business issues that will affect growth, profitability, and long-term success.

The Phases of Integration Maturity

The Gartner Integration Maturity Model breaks down companies’ progress toward implementing comprehensive integration strategies into five stages – and puts those five stages into three overarching phases.

Getting Started

The “getting started” phase in Gartner’s maturity assessment includes two of its five stages:

Ad Hoc

  • No formal integration strategy
  • Little or no acknowledgment of integration as an interdependent issue or discipline
  • Integration tools are not used or only infrequently used for specific projects
  • Any integration solution relies heavily on custom coding or scripting

Enlightened

  • Integration is recognized as an issue
  • No formal responsibility for integration
  • IT resources are used for integration solution procurement and support

State of Enterprise Integration Report: 71% of enterprises are embracing integration.

Standardization

Gartner estimates around 60% of businesses are in the phase, which includes two more stages:

Centralized

  • Integration is a recognized competency, overseen by a formally defined integration competency center
  • The ICC employs various specialists, selects platforms and tools, and defines best practices
  • The minimum level of Gartner’s integration maturity model needed to effectively meet the growing need for integration

State of Enterprise Integration Report: 74% of IT professionals in manufacturing report needing integration to address as much as 60% of their IT backlog.

Collaborative

  • Systems in place to support company-wide integration needs
  • ICC evolves into an integration strategy empowerment team
  • ISET selects and delivers integration tools in a centrally governed service

Business Utility

At this final stage, integration is embedded in the organization’s digital culture, and there is an understanding that integration must be a pervasive competency that includes both internal and external partners. The ISET facilitates self-service integration – supporting business users who may occasionally need to perform integration tasks in the completion of their duties.

State of Enterprise Integration Report: 79% of enterprise IT professionals say they have impactful and significantly more down time than expected.

How to Achieve an Efficient Integration

The findings in Gartner’s maturity assessment and the data in the State of Enterprise Integration report are aligned on the importance of an organization-wide integration strategy – and the fact that many businesses are far from implementation. So how can organizations accelerate integration to reach the levels needed to respond to rising demand?

  • Be realistic about what your organization needs and can implement
  • Stop thinking of integration as a tool to minimize costs and start treating it as a force multiplier that increases value
  • Educate yourself and your team about integration patterns and technology
  • Identify use cases for integration in your organization and develop strategy with those in mind
  • Determine key functionalities you will use to evaluate integration solutions
  • Align stakeholders on the integration requirements that will come with business transformation
  • Plan and develop a hybrid integration platform and self-service integration model
  • Apply your new capabilities strategically to business opportunities
  • Promote self-service integration across your organization and experiment with business user-led initiatives to test and improve your strategy

Remember, a lack of effective integration strategy can cost your business in a variety of tangible ways. Although the road to implementing a strategy can seem challenging, accelerated integration can be achieved if you approach it carefully and methodically.

Digibee Can Help Accelerate Enterprise Integrations

Digibee’s unique enterprise iPaaS can help your organization accelerate digital transformations and increase your organization’s IT maturity – and we can make it happen faster than any other integration solution.

To learn more about accelerating integration and how to determine what stage your business is at, request a demo today.

How to Integrate–And Modernize–Your Enterprise

Posted on October 24, 2022 by - Enterprise Integration Solutions

Your organization likely uses multiple systems every day just to get business done. Your company and end-to-end supply chain may use different customer relationship management (CRM) systems and enterprise resource management (ERP) systems to manage day-to-day tasks.

Various departments might jump back and forth between project management software and production software, logistics systems and ecommerce platforms, and different software-as-a-service (SaaS) systems for various clients or vendors.

From sales and marketing to backend logistics and asset and product management, organizational silos lack visibility, making it impossible to make informed decisions for your business.

The complexity of gathering data and insights from multiple sources can be a challenge, especially when the acronyms alone are enough to make your head spin. As a CEO, you need clarity, insight and transparency throughout your organization to understand the state of your business at any given moment.

How much time would you save and how much easier would your job be if all of those systems were integrated? Then you could have all of your programs and associated data available to you instantly, without organizational silos or having to hop from one system to another. An enterprise integration platform as a service (iPaaS) can make that happen.

>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business. 

warehouse-workers-checking-inventory-on-a-computer

What is an iPaaS?

An iPaaS solution is a scalable subscription-based service that bridges the gap between your current systems and new technologies, by connecting data and platforms that have never been connected before, regardless of underlying silos or legacy infrastructure.

Recent Gartner Research shows that enterprise iPaaS solutions had 38% growth in 2020, reaching $3.5 billion, becoming the largest stand-alone integration market. 

What This Means for Business Leaders

For CEOs and other business leaders, moving toward an iPaaS solution means no more logging into different platforms to gather data and insights from across your organization. It means no longer accessing ecommerce platforms and CRM systems separately, or trying to decipher analytics and gain insights from disparate data. 

It means having the ability to connect all of your end-to-end ERP and CRM systems and software into one platform to eliminate silos and integrate programs and data across the enterprise. Just imagine being able to access all of the information you need to gain overall insight into the organization in real time – all in one place. It’s possible, and it can happen in just a few short weeks. Seriously.

How does integration impact business functions?

An iPaaS solution integrates data from multiple sources, including CRM, ERP, ecommerce, and automation integration.

Let’s drill down into how each of these systems serve the business and why it’s important to integrate them.

CRM integration

  • Customer relationship management (CRM) systems are critical to store important customer and prospect data and to track customer interactions. Whether your integrated CRM is operational, analytical, or collaborative, CRM integrations can provide a complete picture of your customers in real time and indicate how they relate to and interact with your sales, marketing, and customer service efforts.

ERP integration

  • Enterprise resource management (ERP) is software that is used to manage day-to-day activities including product, asset, and project management. ERP system integration is vital to keep everything on track, especially when multiple clients or vendors are involved.

Ecommerce integration

  • It’s critical for organizations to have ecommerce integration for real time, accurate, seamless data transfer between your ecommerce platforms and key areas of your business including marketing, sales, inventory, accounting, and your CRM systems.

Automation integration

  • Intelligent automation integration can help with artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives, and can help alleviate tedious tasks such as gathering insights and analytics from multiple sources. In a recent Deloitte survey of executives, 73% of respondents say their organization has embarked on a path to intelligent automation. (Which interestingly, jumped 58% from Deloitte’s survey done prior to the pandemic.)

Enterprise Integration is Important, So Why Isn’t Everyone Doing It?

Most business leaders understand the importance of enterprise integration. The recent Digibee State of Enterprise Integration Report 2022 shows that the majority of respondents believe it is a top priority, but few have taken action to make it happen.

93%
say enterprise integration is vital to their business or nice to have

7%
have successfully implemented an enterprise integration strategy

94%
of those who haven’t implemented don’t even have a solution in mind

Enterprise integration is critical, yet it’s clear most companies don’t have a strategy. Why? It may be because decision makers are not aware of the components of an effective integration strategy.

These include:

  • Defining the goals of your project
  • Securing alignment with your team
  • Choosing the right technology

Collaboration is key to successful business integration

C-level executives must work together, along with their respective extended teams and other stakeholders across the organization, to ensure the development of an effective integration strategy. Businesses can only select the right integration solution through collaboration and understanding of cross-functional needs throughout the enterprise.

It’s time to stop using so many different systems and modernize your organization with enterprise integration. Don’t procrastinate. Integrate, automate, and innovate your business with an effective iPaaS strategy.

The State of Enterprise Integration Report by Digibee offers unique, data-based insights into the latest trends in enterprise integration as well as a look at current best practices and changes to expect in the future.

Learn more about Digibee’s innovative approach to integration. Download your free copy of the report today. Or, if you prefer, contact our experts directly for more information.

Your data, fully integrated, in less than three weeks. Let Digibee show you how

3 Pillars of an Effective Integration Strategy

Posted on October 19, 2022 by - Enterprise Integration Solutions, IT

Enterprises are adopting digital-first strategies to help increase operational efficiency and meet changing customer expectations. But companies reliant on legacy systems and siloed data are at a disadvantage compared to their digital native competitors and must integrate existing systems and data with modern tools.

Many business leaders recognize the urgency to modernize their infrastructure, but most face significant challenges when it comes to developing an effective enterprise integration strategy.

The State of Integration

Almost all – 93% – of enterprise IT professionals acknowledge the value of integration, with 57% saying integration strategy is vital to the success of their business. And yet implementation remains low. Worse still, organizations that integrate without an effective strategy in place report a range of negative impacts:

  • Inability to adopt new technologies
  • Ineffective processes that hamper growth and success
  • Limited ability to respond to market changes
  • IT specialists forced to focus on low-value work

So what’s going wrong? Why is progress on integration roadmaps so slow?

One problem is that many organizations are focusing on integration technology first and failing to consider the other components of an effective integration strategy. While choosing the right solution to support your enterprise integration framework is important, there are other considerations that must come first.

>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business. 

The Three Pillars

1. Define the Goals of Your Project

Before you choose which integration solution is right for your organization, you have to define what you hope to achieve and identify any gaps in your integration capabilities. 

The majority of enterprise IT experts agree that integration is important, but their reasons vary considerably:

  • Enable the use of artificial intelligence and/or automation
  • Improve security or governance
  • Reduce operational costs
  • Decrease time to market
  • Improve analytics and decision-making capabilities
  • Upgrade from legacy infrastructure or migrate to the cloud

Once you’ve identified the reasons driving your enterprise integration project, make a list of any factors that could delay or derail implementation. Is the cost of integration a major concern? Are you worried about disruptions to daily operations during the transition? Do you have compliance standards that need to be maintained during your integration journey? Is the potential complexity of the project holding you back?

2. Secure Alignment Among Your Team

As we collected data on the state of enterprise integration in 2022, we uncovered a distinct disparity between different stakeholders when we asked who the key players in integration strategy were:

  • 65% of CIOs said members of the C-suite were the major stakeholders
  • 72% of developers and architects said that IT was running the show

That gap in perspective is a problem. If two groups with competing priorities and goals each think they’re the principal player in developing an integration strategy, the odds of alignment between objectives and challenges are pretty low. 

Forming an enterprise integration strategy team can help ensure that all perspectives are heard and considered as you build an integration roadmap. Make sure you include input from:

  • Enterprise architects
  • Integration specialists
  • Development teams
  • Executive leaders
  • Anyone who will use your integration solution

Involving players at all organizational levels can help you develop a strategy that achieves everyone’s goals – and avoid dealing with a patchwork of shadow IT solutions.

3. Choose the Right Technology

After you’ve completed these two steps, you’re ready for the final component of your enterprise integration strategy – choosing the right solution. Where other companies have skipped straight to this step, the time and effort you’ve invested in getting to this point will reduce your risk of experiencing common integration pitfalls. 

Selecting the right solution will be much easier now that your collaborative team has already defined what you’re trying to achieve and what’s standing in your way. You should have alignment on factors like:

  • Short- and long-term goals
  • Cost
  • Timeline
  • Specific concerns or priorities

Build Your Integration Strategy with Digibee

At Digibee, we understand that business doesn’t stop while you make changes to your systems and processes. Our innovative iPaaS ensures your organization has the flexibility and agility you need to compete in a digital-first world without compromising the high level of service your customers have come to expect.

Digibee’s unique business model means you can try our solution without a lengthy commitment or hefty upfront investment. And even better – we can shorten the time it takes to implement your integration strategy from months to weeks.

Don’t miss out! You’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain. Request a demo now.

Choosing the Right Integration Solution for Your Manufacturing Organization White Paper

Posted on October 17, 2022 by - Uncategorized

A practical guide to help manufacturers maximize the return on investment of their integrations.

About this Guide

For enterprises focusing their efforts on transitioning to digital-first operations, system integration is more than just a “nice to have” option, it’s crucial to a scalable, reliable and effective digital transformation strategy. 

According to McKinsey Global Institute, the manufacturing industry generates an average of 1.9 petabytes (or 1,900 terabytes) each year – primarily from supply chains, sourcing, and factory operations, as well as compliance and quality management processes. This is more than any other vertical.  Finding the best solutions and technology for your manufacturing business is a challenge that goes far beyond the success of integrations as they relate to data. This white paper aims to provide a practical guide for manufacturers to maximize the ROI of their integrations.

Key Highlights

The guide provides information on what to expect, pros and cons, and how to examine priorities to determine the right fit for your organization’s options between buying an integration solution and building your own, including:

  • Understanding the options, resources needed, risks, requirements, and what to expect between buying an enterprise integration platform as a service (iPaaS) versus building (developing and deploying) an in-house data integration solution.
  • The considerations needed to properly evaluate a data integration solution, such as systems and data sources, use cases, and available resources.
  • The pros and cons of buying versus building a solution.
  • The top five challenges manufacturers face with digital transformation efforts.
  • A checklist for prioritizing business objectives for your integration.

Digibee’s low-code, cloud-native enterprise iPaaS helps manufacturing enterprises eliminate the roadblocks to digital transformation, bridging the gap between legacy systems and new technologies seamlessly and securely. Download the How to choose the right integration solution for your manufacturing organization white paper now to learn more.

Maximize Integration Efforts with the Gartner Integration Maturity Model

Posted on October 14, 2022 by - Enterprise Integration Solutions

According to us, the Gartner Integration Maturity Model quantifies the progression of enterprises in their digital transformation journey, providing a framework by which organizations can determine where they are across the five stages of maturity.

Stages of Enterprise Integration

Understanding your current state of integration–whether it’s average or amazing–helps to inform your overall strategy, providing tangible markers you must achieve in the advancement of this business-critical initiative. 

In the report, Gartner identifies five different stages of enterprise integration:

Stage 1: Ad Hoc – No formal (or informal) integration strategy is in place. Work is tackled on a project-by-project basis. No dedicated resources.
Stage 2: Enlightened – A formal policy is in place, but at a macro level. Dedicated human and financial resources are in place to support the work.
Stage 3: Centralized – An established team delivers integration services, with a formal, centrally managed sourcing strategy.
Stage 4: Collaborative – An Integration Strategy Empowerment Team (ISET) is created to govern and support distributed teams focused on integration. Education and engagement programs support expansion of the approach.
Stage 5: Self-Service Integration – IT and non-IT personas are empowered to self-serve, with the ISET managing the continuous alignment of self-service integration with the overall business strategy.

Progression of Enterprises Within the Maturity Model

7% have successfully implemented an enterprise integration strategy

While some organizations transcend quickly through the different maturity models, most make slow progress, hampered by budgetary concerns, existing legacy infrastructure, and resourcing issues. As a result, Gartner estimates that less than 5% of their client base has achieved the highest maturity level, Stage 5: Self-Service.

These findings align with the 2022 Digibee State of Enterprise Integration Report, where only 7% of 1,000+ business and technology leaders reported that they’ve successfully implemented an enterprise integration strategy. So what’s taking so long? 

Take the Lead with iPaaS

Rapid acceleration of your enterprise integration strategy isn’t always easy–and sometimes it’s not even possible, especially in the early stages (1 and 2). But as the business becomes more organized, even in Stage 3 with a centralized model, we see greater adoption of technology to help, in particular enterprise integration platform as a service. 

The implementation of iPaaS streamlines the work required to connect systems, data, and other infrastructure, quickly advancing integration initiatives, including cloud migration, modernization of legacy architecture, and collaborative integrations across customers and partners.

Once supported with an iPaaS system, your enterprise will really start to evolve with the advantages of system integration, enabling activation of projects that drive meaningful value to the organization. Here are the top initiatives leaders prioritized in the 2022 Digibee State of Enterprise Integration report:

  • AI & automation enablement (31%)
  • Improve data security (28%)
  • Improve security, reliability, governance (28%)
  • Reduce operational costs (28%)
  • Faster time to market (27%)
  • Better business analytics and decision making (24%)
  • Cloud migration, upgrade, or digital transformation (23%)
  • Upgrade from legacy infrastructure (21%)

>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business. 

3 Steps to Achieve the Highest Maturity Levels

Progressive organizations lead the way at Stages 4 and 5 with an established ISET to manage and support integration initiatives across the enterprise. If your organization sits at a lower stage, don’t despair. Here are three key recommendations to help you quickly evolve to the highest maturity levels:

1. Define Your Current Maturity Stage

Take a cold hard look at your current integration capabilities. Are you investing too much time and money rebuilding what you’ve already built? The 2022 Digibee Enterprise Integration Report reveals that 98% of organizations repeatedly rebuild integrations for key business applications every year. With multiple applications running, the investment quickly becomes chronic and ongoing. Explore all of these inefficiencies and use them to support an iPaaS business case.

2. Build a Business Case for iPaaS

Digibee customers always have a clear-cut objective in mind prior to implementing the Digibee iPaaS. What’s yours? Revisit the list in the previous segment and select an initiative that is meaningful to your organization to help measure the ROI of enterprise integration. Research the best enterprise tool for your business, then build your iPaaS business case. This exercise will provide you with quantifiable efficiencies you can use to easily offset the budget and resources the project will require.

3. Create an Ad Hoc ISET to Lead the Charge

You don’t have to wait until you hit Stage 4 or 5 in the maturity model to build an ISET. Use existing in-house resources, the business and technology leaders who recognize that digital transformation is a business imperative. Harness the passion of curious developers, system architects, and citizen integrators who want to participate hands-on with the project. This is the team that will help guide you through all of the stages of integration maturity.

“By 2023 at least 50% of organizations will have an ISET to support self-service and other integration approaches.”

Integration Maturity Model, February 2022

With Digibee’s low code integration model, you can implement integrations 40% faster, decreasing operating costs with fewer incidents, faster recovery times, and zero downtime. These efficiencies help free up resources to focus on the highest value work for your enterprise. 

Read the entire Gartner Integration Maturity Model report to determine where your organization stands, including delivery, strategy, platform, and engagement models across all stages.

To learn more about Digibee, request a demo now.

Gartner, Gartner’s Integration Maturity Model, Abhishek Singh, Massimo Pezzini, and 2 more, 7 August 2020

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

Death by Downtime: Enterprise Integration Strategies

Posted on October 12, 2022 by - Enterprise Integration Solutions, IT

As a business leader, you’re responsible for the health and success of the company. Accountable to the board, investors, customers, and employees, you must ensure the organization responds with agility to changes in the market.

In the recent Digibee Enterprise Integration Report, one of the data points we uncovered was particularly surprising. 

When asked about downtime encountered during their integration project, 79% reported system downtime that was significant, impactful, and more than expected. This is a 27% increase over 2022.

Based on the survey results and interactions with our customers, it’s clear the majority of enterprises embarking on an integration project simply presume downtime will occur (and likely a lot of it). Rather than the exception, downtime has become the rule with many technology leaders factoring it into their integration strategies. 

But it doesn’t have to be like this.

>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business. 

Downtime: Costs to the Business

We all pay a price for downtime and it’s only going up. In 2014, Gartner research indicated that the average cost of downtime was $5,600 per minute, for an hourly average of over $300K.

In 2022, ITIC research shows the cost has increased significantly for 90% of SME and large enterprises, with 44% reporting that a single hour of downtime could potentially cost over $1M. A staggering hit to the bottom line.

While security is at the top of the ITIC research list in terms of issues impacting downtime, integration/interoperability ranks in the top ten, along with human error, software bugs/flaws, complexity in configuring new apps, and understaffed/overworked IT departments. All of these are likely enterprise integration challenges you may encounter during your project.

The Big Bang Strategy

Typically, the blame for downtime is attributed to the integration technology. However, based on our experience, this outcome is more often due to poor planning or a lack of planning overall. While the integration strategy you create is critical to the strength of your plan and its execution, the wrong strategy will only compound the downtime your business encounters.

We see this a lot with big bang enterprise integration strategies. This model requires that you integrate all business modules at once. On paper this seems like an efficient and faster method to achieve enterprise integration, but in real-life it is extremely time-consuming and inefficient.

With a big bang strategy, critical failures increase since testing occurs at the end of the project once all integrations are complete—versus incrementally throughout the project. Tracing individual failures is also more complicated and time-consuming, forcing developers to go back and test each integration point.

Similar to a string of holiday lights, when one bulb fails, they all fail. The system can’t be restored until the fault is located.

security-system-engineer-identifying-problem-downtime-issues-SEI-report-blog

The Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service Strategy

Of course, a zero downtime deployment is rarely possible as we all encounter some integration problems during these projects. But with an effective integration strategy and the right technology, the risk of downtime and interruptions to the business are minimized.

Unlike big bang strategies that force us to rework the majority of existing integrations due to downstream dependencies, iPaaS technology enables a more deliberate, phased approach. Instead of investing significant manpower and resources out of the gate, iPaaS delivers a thoughtful and linear model that expedites outcomes while saving time and money.

Three Steps to Minimize Business Downtime

“Are you building around the tool or is the tool building around your business?”

Based on our work with enterprises across industries, here are three constructive steps that will help minimize business downtime during your integration project:

1. Select the right technology

Select a solution that allows you to build enterprise integrations the way you want them to be built. Ask yourself: are you building around the tool or is the tool building around your business? The technology you select must meet you where you’re at today, not the other way around. Adjusting your business model to accommodate your integration platform will almost always lead to unnecessary downtime.

2. Focus on the subset of connections

Abstract out the different connections across your entire integration strategy, then focus on the essential piece you want to migrate. Maintain all other systems, allowing them to coexist as usual by decoupling architecture from data flows. Contemporary iPaaS technology allows you to apply this metered approach for greater flexibility and uptime.

3. Minimize rework

Rework and downtime are inextricably linked. But while some rework is required for your integration project, it’s certainly not at the scale of a big bang strategy where all existing integrations must be touched. An iPaaS solution allows you to integrate in stages versus all at once. Smaller teams are able to perform the work at a faster cadence for an agile and cost-effective project.

The Digibee iPaaS provides additional measures to help our customers avoid downtime and other enterprise integration issues.

For example, the platform runs legacy and modern systems in tandem during implementation for always-on reliability. While your company carries on business as usual, system architects and developers are building, running, monitoring, and securing your new integration infrastructure.

The formal switch-over doesn’t occur until all connections are tested and validated. Best of all, this model is repeatable, carried out each time a new integration is enabled.

Your Enterprise Integration Business Case

You already face an uphill battle quantifying the value of an intangible such as enterprise integration to secure funding and support for the project. Diminishing promised value due to business downtime and other avoidable outcomes only weakens your position. 

If you are in the midst of planning an integration strategy for your organization, you’re not alone. Read the Digibee Enterprise Integration Report to learn how 1,000+ of your peers are preparing for their digital transformation. The report examines common pitfalls, best practices, and key takeaways to help inform your business case.

How to Align Your Stakeholders for S/4HANA Success

Posted on October 10, 2022 by - Cloud Migration, Enterprise Integration Solutions, IT, SAP

The success of any IT project that involves the migration from established, foundational technology to contemporary, cloud-based technology, is often determined by how well you integrate the old with the new.

Case in point is the impending SAP S/4HANA migration, which for many organizations will be the largest IT project they’ve undertaken in years (if not decades). This mammoth task requires enterprise integrations across multiple systems and data stores in support of a more agile, resilient, and competitive business.  

Along with a solid project integration strategy to support your SAP S/4HANA migration, success is also defined based on the time and resources consumed, as well as any downtime to the business. But even with the best project strategy, achieving your desired outcomes is difficult (if not impossible) if your internal stakeholders are not aligned on the objectives of the project. 

For example, your CIO may expect that your impending SAP S/4HANA migration will immediately improve data security, whereas your CFO may expect an overall reduction in operational costs. Perhaps your Sales leader expects a faster time to market for new offerings, while your IT team is aiming for business process optimization and improved system reliability. 

While each of these objectives is achievable, delivering all of them on day one is not. Aligning the priorities and expectations of internal teams is a critical factor in the success of your SAP S/4HANA migration strategy.

success-team-successful-group-at-work

>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business. 

A Meeting of the Minds

An international study about SAP S/4HANA transformation by LeanIX bears this out, with 66% of SAP users describing the alignment of teams (business, project, IT) as the biggest hurdle they face in migrating to SAP S/4HANA.

This lack of alignment impacts all aspects of your migration strategy, including enterprise integration and how internal teams prioritize these critical connections. 

The Digibee Enterprise Integration Report sums up an in-depth survey we conducted of business and technology leaders. For the report, we solicited input from respondents who had already implemented an enterprise-level integration initiative of a scale similar to the S/4HANA migration. We asked these leaders to identify three aspects of the project most likely to impact budget and spend. 

Everything is a priority

Top of the list was competing priorities, clearly reflecting a lack of alignment in how these important connections are ranked by internal teams:

SEI-2023-top-integration-objectives-for-transformation-graphic

*This blog post, originally published in October 2022, was updated above to reflect data from the 2023 State of Enterprise Integration Report published in April, 2023.

While the variety of desired use cases reflects the broad scope of enterprise integration in supporting your S/4HANA migration, lack of clarity in prioritizing the work results in conflict amongst stakeholders, delaying implementation and increasing costs as everyone marches to the beat of their own drummer. 

System downtime and resourcing were the other aspects leadership called out as most impactful to project budget and spend. 

3 Steps to Plan (and Align) for Success

These steps will guide you in creating an effective integration strategy that will help drive alignment amongst your internal teams, while ensuring the success of your S/4HANA migration strategy.

  1. Organize your integration strategy in stages. Focus on a single objective as an initial stage, socializing the strategy with stakeholder groups before any work occurs. This serves as a dry run and an initial exercise in project prioritization for internal teams. Implement additional objectives in subsequent stages, increasing workloads as the IT and project teams gain momentum.
  2. Build a cost-effective integration strategy. While business and technology leaders have valid concerns around budget, time, and people, with enterprise iPaaS technology, you can easily leverage in-house resources and other efficiencies to ensure your integration strategy delivers results in record time and on budget.
  3. Include the medium- and longer-term benefits of enterprise integration in your migration business case. While a successful integration strategy is imperative to your SAP S/4HANA migration, eiPaaS technology delivers continuous, ongoing value and innovation to your business:

Digibee Supports Business Process Optimization

Digibee works with organizations globally, supporting SAP S/4HANA migrations with flexible and fast integration strategies. 

With our low code integration model, Digibee customers implement integrations 40% faster, decreasing operating costs with fewer incidents, faster recovery times, and zero downtime. These efficiencies help free up resources to focus on the higher priority S/4HANA migration work. 

Visit our SAP S/4HANA integration page to learn more or request a demo with our team to discuss your upcoming migration plan.