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On behalf of my co-founders Peter Kreslins and Vitor Sousa I am very pleased to share the news of our Series B funding round. This round brought $60 million in additional funding to Digibee, bringing our total funding to date to well over $90 million. This funding indicates a very clear endorsement of our product, strategy and our future.
Discussion with a sales team member highlighting the challenges IT departments face on their journey to integration and Digibee’s people-centric approach.
The Digibee State of Enterprise Integration survey, was carried out earlier this year, compiling input and opinions from one thousand CTOs, CIOs, system architects, and web developers in North America.
The survey data provides compelling insights to the state of integration across multiple industries. In this blog post we explore some of the findings specific to Retail, one of three industry sub-reports we published.
One distinct and very interesting insight is the “why” behind enterprise integration. Based on responses from Retailers, the highest-value objectives for integration rank as follows:
One theme ties these three objectives together: Proactive investment in innovation to better compete. It’s clear that retailers can’t afford to be complacent in today’s changing landscape. And while integration hasn’t traditionally been viewed as a strategic technology, the truly insightful leaders see how integration can help enable key innovation. This insight is reflected in these objectives.
>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business.
Almost 35% of respondents rank time to market as the top enterprise integration objective for Retail. This makes sense when you consider the significant upside to the business, including greater market share, increased revenue, and a meaningful leg up on the competition.
When a retailer is able to reduce time to market, the business is rewarded with more selling days. Especially important within the e-commerce use case, where customers shopping online expect to find the newest products and services at their fingertips. And when they don’t, it’s an easy hop to the next online retailer.
But being first to market is only half of the equation. The product or service you deliver to your customers is also key. Accurate data analytics – especially real-time data – are critical in allowing you to meet (and even beat) customer expectations, with businesses achieving up to 70% in market share as the first to market with a new product.
Improving time to market in retail is all about greater efficiencies throughout the organization. Optimized supply chains, real-time data analytics, and e-commerce integration with adjacent software applications and systems. Retail digital transformation is essential to all of these advances, and enterprise integration is the foundation upon which it is built.
Without a truly connected environment, retailers lack the insights to understand what’s working, where improvements are needed–and most importantly–to gauge in real-time the quality of the customer experiences they deliver.
The State of Enterprise Integration for Retail Report
At number two on the integration objectives list for Retailers is cloud/digital transformation.
Given the speed of innovation within retail, this is not a surprising result. In recent years, we’ve seen the rapid adoption of some amazing technologies, for example, digital and curated shopping, automated checkouts, and enhancements in how retail inventory systems are managed and optimized. Digital transformation – and especially the cloud – have enabled all of these advances.
Today, the retail cloud market in North America is expected to grow at an astounding CAGR of 4.56%, for a valuation of $109.98 billion USD from 2023-2030.
With so much opportunity, it’s no surprise companies are hopping on the retail digital transformation bus in record numbers, with most aiming to elevate the customer experience (CX) they deliver. No longer a nice-to-have, a personalized and omnichannel CX is table stakes for most retailers.
In order to evolve, retailers must shift to a composable technology stack, allowing them to rapidly adapt and adopt new technologies as needed, a non-starter with traditional monolithic retail platforms.
Enterprise integration connects the old with the new, knitting together all of the different systems and applications in the retail stack, supporting agility and flexibility in an industry where change is constant.
Retailers ranked automation and AI number three on their integration objectives list, a natural evolution once the cloud and digital transformation initiatives are in place.
The prioritization of AI is reflected in the global retail market numbers where retail market size is expected to reach about $45.74 billion USD by 2032, growing at an estimated CAGR of 18.45% from 2023 to 2032.
When you consider the volumes of data generated by digital e-commerce, AI is an imperative. With AI, retailers are able to organize and examine data in real-time from a range of sources (e-commerce data, retail ERP systems, marketplace, customer, and competitor information, etc.)
The results speak for themselves. Data insights that support amazingly accurate demand forecasting for improved inventory management; the detection of early-stage changes in market and consumer behaviors; and, since all roads lead back to the CX, real-time data that optimizes customer interactions.
AI is helping retailers build interactive systems that streamline customer communication throughout the buying journey. This improves the quality of customer personalization and engagement.
Forbes
The Future of Retail: Four Ways For The Industry to Utilize AI
Real-time access to accurate customer profile and order history, e-commerce chatbots, tracking of e- and in-store activities, an improved check-out experience, and even product placement are made better with AI.
AI also enables automation, a valuable capability that delivers meaningful benefits across the retail operation. All of the advances noted in the preceding digital transformation section previously fell to humans, making for time-consuming and often error-ridden work. AI frees workers from these mundane tasks while increasing accuracy and speed.
Digibee’s low-code, cloud-native integration platform as a service (iPaaS) technology enables you to connect all of the dots (and IT infrastructure) to help you achieve your digital transformation objectives.
Download your complimentary copy of the Digibee State of Enterprise Integration for Retail sub-report today for a deep dive into all of the data. Understand how your peers are progressing and examine year-over-year trends and observations to inform your integration strategy.
In 2023, Digibee’s conducted its second annual annual State of Enterprise Integration survey, reaching out to one thousand CTOs, CIOs, system architects, and web developers in North America.
In this blog post series, we examine one of the top findings in the report, as ranked by your peers. Implementation time stood out as one of the biggest challenges when embarking on an IT digital transformation strategy. Many survey respondents said while their goal was accelerating digital transformation, integration implementation took much longer and was more complicated than expected.
An orchardist, scuba diver, avid-traveler, animal-lover, and process-guru – meet our multilingual, and self-described, “introverted extrovert” – it’s Digibee’s wonderful Controller, Nina Kachanova.
The 2023 data is in, and Digibee’s second annual annual State of Enterprise Integration survey, is out! We reached out to more than a thousand enterprise IT professionals – from web developers and system architects to CTOs and CIOs – across North America to understand today’s integration trends, challenges, and opportunities.
Now we’re diving into some of the key findings with a series of blog posts – this one focuses on IT budgets and the cost of integration.
The path to digital transformation is never a smooth one, with most enterprises facing some serious house cleaning before they achieve their desired future state. Typically, we focus our efforts on the legacy systems and non-cloud-native applications holding us back. Rarely do we place APIs in this category.
Long the savior of IT teams around the world, APIs have helped us simplify integrations, support communication between systems, and liberate applications from siloed, monolithic architecture. While impressive (and imperative) capabilities for the enterprise, APIs bring their own legacy challenges to the table.
To ensure the success of your enterprise integration strategy, the modernization of APIs must be a part of the plan.
>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business.
In 2023, Digibee conducted our second annual State of Enterprise Integration survey, reaching out to one thousand CTOs, CIOs, system architects, and web developers in North America.
In this series, we examine the top findings uncovered in the report, including the number one objective of organizations when implementing enterprise integration: cloud migration.
With host Cait Porte, Chief Marketing Officer at Digibee
In this episode of “Integration. Redesigned.,” our host, Digibee’s Chief Marketing Officer Cait Porte, is joined by Field Chief Technology Officer for Latin America, Andre Campos, for a discussion exploring IT departments. Cait and Andre cover topics including how IT departments have evolved, building them, the current perceptions around them, the challenges they face and ways to overcome those challenges, the importance of collaboration between IT and other departments, and the crucial role these departments can play to deliver significant value to their company. One perception in particular discussed is the significant expense of IT for companies while IT struggles to demonstrate their value. Cait and Andre cover how prioritizing IT departments to drive digital transformation efforts can become a competitive advantage for businesses.
CAIT PORTE:
Welcome back to another episode. I’m Cait Porte, your host. And today we are talking with our Digibee Field CTO for Latin America, Andre Campos. Welcome, Andre.
ANDRE CAMPOS:
Hi Cait. It’s good to be here again.
CAIT PORTE:
Thank you for joining us.
Very excited about the topic today, which is building an IT department and why that is seen as such a huge expense for a company. I think I may know the headline here, but very happy to have you to talk about this.
I think we’ve talked about digital transformation a number of times on the podcast and I think we will continue to do that. When we think about digital transformation, it’s a necessary evil, as we say, because we have to do this – IT teams and departments and all of the technology we have available relevant – and it’s expensive and takes longer typically than you expect, creating some frustration between everyone working on anything related to digital transformation and trying to limit the amount of cross-functional frustration that happens. Right?
Rodrigo talked about how IT departments have lost a little bit of credibility even though they’re so crucial, now more than ever. So why is this the case at some companies? From your experience and past life, what are you seeing? Why are we seeing such a friction between the necessary evil of getting them and where there’s an expense?
ANDRE CAMPOS:
I think that we are in a changing period. If you go back in history 20 years ago and thinking about history 20 years is not so. That time, IT was responsible for support business and to keep everything up and running. And every new project took a lot of time and was hard to implement. Everything was manual, and was hard to meet business expectations because of the lack of technology, the lack of understanding. There was not much partners to work together to deliver what was expected. And I think that the combination of everything has created the bad reputation of IT and it’s been hard to change it through the years. It’s been changing, but we are in the middle of this change.
CAIT PORTE:
I love that and I think we’re trying to shift the tide, right? And we’re trying to change that perspective or perception of IT.
When we think about where we are, what do you see as maybe the top challenge that IT departments are faced with in trying to get the support that they need to deliver?
ANDRE CAMPOS:
I think that we have to always remember that transformation is not about technology, it’s about people. It’s not about how technology will think, will change everything, but how people will use technology to change everything. I know it’s not that strong, but it’s different. So, how are you going to use the right technology, the right partners, to help people changing their daily basis work? Or help people changing the relationship they have with their customers or the other business that are partners? So handling it, thinking about the business need as the center of everything is key to change and to accelerate the digital transformation.
CAIT PORTE:
I agree with that being on the receiving end of digital transformation in the past. But, for a company that doesn’t see IT as a default department sort of just say “yes, we have to have this, because…” When a business isn’t built on technology, how do companies, in your opinion, approach technology, digital transformation, with a mindset that it is a competitive advantage, not just another expense?
ANDRE CAMPOS:
I think it is a matter of natural selection. All the companies that – well we are in the moment that we are having changings in the customer behaviors, in the relation between business to business – so there is a lot of things that has to be changed. So, if the company doesn’t face it as something that will make the business better, more performative to match customer expectations, it will be something that will leave them behind the others. They don’t want to create a differentiator, they’ll just be another company and the customer will definitely select another provider. So, it’s key to start this transformation.
CAIT PORTE:
Interesting comment there. And I think many companies are faced with is it the people, is it the technology? Is it a mindset shift that we move toward? And, what is going to impact the bottom line? So when you look at those things – I mean, you already mentioned people, you already mentioned that you can’t just get technology – what would you give as a recommendation for other teams to say hey, let’s get it to perform at its best? And, to deliver the most for the company?
ANDRE CAMPOS:
I think that this evolution, this change is happening now. And, I think that is happening in a lot of different dimensions. We have more technology available, so it’s easier and faster to find platforms that can help this process, to find good partners, to help these partners. I think that we, you and me, we are immersed in a lot of technology. We have smartphones, we see Netflix and streaming and everything. We can have everything faster. So, we now know how technology can help us in our lives. And I think that because of the changes and the need of meet customers expectations to change the way we relate with other business, this pressure is making the business and IT departments work better together. So, it’s been easier to bring IT from the “doer department” to a “strategic department.” This is the right moment to do that.
And, I think that the pandemic has accelerated that. Putting IT in now because of the restrictions we had. IT was the most important part to allow the business to keep running. And, I think that knowing business better, having business and technology working together, this is the most important change to go through the digital transformation.
CAIT PORTE:
I was thinking about this earlier. In past lives I’ve worked in a product capacity, and the most success – and I know that you are coming from a CIO background and experience, right? I’m assuming that you’d echo this – in that the most success that we’ve had is when as a product team, we’ve presented from a business lens to the IT department to say, “hey, this is the challenge we’re trying to solve. Help us figure out how to do that.” As opposed to very prescriptively, “here’s the solution, go get it done.” And I think that has always been the case. But there’s certainly more success when we really involve IT from the beginning in solving a problem and utilizing that skill set.
ANDRE CAMPOS:
Exactly. Yeah, that’s it. My point of view, IT is the most important agent of change. Knowing better the business and knowing technology. And most important than that, knowing how to apply technology in benefit of the business. So having IT involved since the beginning, applying the right technology, having the right partners. This is very important to have success process.
CAIT PORTE:
Absolutely. Well, thank you, Andre, for joining us today. Always a pleasure to have you on. Love to hear the experience about how we can make IT teams look good again, right? And deliver that value.
So thank you for joining us.
ANDRE CAMPOS:
Thank you very much. It was a pleasure.
Passionate educator, technology enthusiast, metalhead, diversity advocate, musician…meet our dynamic and driven Head of Education and Documentation Fabricio Inocêncio! I’m certain I could’ve talked with Fabricio for hours, but I had to let him get back to his important work helping to make Digibee a better place for our team and customers!
Cloud migration is becoming more and more common – and increasingly complex. While most organizations have moved at least some of their digital assets to the cloud, cloud migration strategies remain prone to disruptions and delays.
But failure is not inevitable. A carefully developed cloud migration roadmap can help you remove roadblocks and avoid common pitfalls. Follow this simple cloud migration checklist to ensure you have everything you need in place for a smooth transition.
>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business.
Digital transformation and cloud migration initiatives have become the number one reason enterprises embrace integration. And while partnering with an integration solutions provider can help minimize disruptions and downtime during the migration process, you’ll still need a cloud migration plan in place to optimize the transition.
Understanding what you hope to achieve is crucial to successful cloud migration. Identify the factors driving your move to the cloud and how you’ll determine if you’ve reached your goals. Is your organization looking to:
The next stage in developing your cloud migration strategy involves planning your target environment in the cloud. This can include selecting a cloud provider – [1] 87% of organizations use a multi-cloud strategy today, so don’t assume your current cloud environment is the right option for new migration plans.
Take an inventory of your data, applications, systems, and infrastructure to determine what will be included in your cloud migration and what will remain in the current environment. Identify any dependencies and data flows that will affect (or be affected by) your transition to the cloud.
Once you’ve identified what is involved in your cloud migration plan and where it will move to, you can start planning how the transition will go.
With your cloud migration goals and roadmap in place, you can begin the task of migrating your assets to the cloud. Working with an integration solutions provider, you’ll need to:
When every step of your cloud migration project plan is complete, it’s vital to validate the success of your transition before going live with the changes. Your new cloud environment should now be an exact copy of your production environment, allowing for rapid testing to confirm all critical services are up and running and all data is accessible.
Transactional histories can be migrated incrementally or in a single operation – your strategy should be determined by the volume and location of your data. Once transactions are replicated, you can flip the switch and adopt the replica environment created in the cloud for production. Shut down integrations relating to the on-premises environment and develop a plan to decommission them.
Integration bridges the gap between your current capabilities and what you hope to achieve in the cloud, reducing the risk associated with cloud migration strategies.
Digibee has developed an Integration Platform-as-a-Service solution that makes it easier for your team to free data from legacy systems and achieve your cloud goals, whatever they may be. Our low-code, intuitive interface simplifies the integration process so developers of all skills levels and experience can create integrations that maximize the value of your investments in the cloud.
Our 2023 State of Enterprise Integration Report highlights the important role integration plays in today’s cloud migration strategies. Download your complimentary copy today or book a no-obligation demo to see our solution in action.
12023 State of the Cloud Report, Flexera
A quick guide for retail businesses looking to take back control to mitigate supply chain and operations risks.
Key highlights from this guide:
Digibee’s integration platform helps retailers quickly transform their integration architecture by enabling seamless connectivity.
Digibee can help you transform your supply chain into a resilient, digitally connected ecosystem. Integration enables real-time, end-to-end visibility, flexibility, and scalability that:
Global food retailer with 12,000+ stores
Restaurant food-chain supplier with 70 facilities in 18 countries
International parcel delivery service
Supermarket chain with 50+ stores
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