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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 each blog post in this series, we examine a top finding in the report, as identified by your peers. Today we dig deep on the impact of system downtime when implementing an integration platform.
Early 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 blog post series, we examine, one-by-one, the top findings in the report, as identified by the input of your peers.
Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with the lovely Felipe Pessoa – a passionate artist, athlete, urbanite, nature-enthusiast, and wellness guru. Read about how Felipe’s diverse interests and experiences have shaped his unique perspective and creative approach to his work as Senior Graphic Designer at Digibee.
Creating a positive customer experience is a key to any business success story. It is a highly iterative and circular process, relying on the quality of communication between the business and customer. With proper customer experience management a business learns where they have met, exceeded, or fallen short in meeting their customer’s needs, and these insights become integral to improving revenue and future performance.
Building a 360 degree customer view—a comprehensive consolidated collection of all of a customer’s data—is an extremely valuable tool in this process of accurately capturing customer behaviors that may indicate opportunities for improvement.
It goes without saying that an improved customer experience is also a huge benefit to the customer themselves… they don’t want to have a poor experience with your business any more than you want them to!
Research shows companies that shift to a more customer-first approach increase revenues by a factor of 3.5. But there’s also a growing sense that customer service can’t be done the old way in a world of changing consumer needs and technology like artificial intelligence, which has the potential to make dramatic improvements.
Forbes Customer Service Is Improving For Many Americans, And Here’s Why
>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business.
Customer service revolves around a purchase, involving interactions before, during, and after a transaction.
Customer experience is a broader term that refers to the overall impression a customer has of a business. This experience encompasses not only the customer service interactions, but all other impressions in the customer journey and could include anything from seeing an ad for the brand, downloading their app, joining a loyalty club, leaving a review, or interacting with a brand’s social media content.
An optimized customer experience successfully incorporates all of (or at least most of) these interactions.
Although customer experience will always bridge both the online and offline spaces, the shift towards digital commerce in the past decade has caused a customer experience transformation. More digital interactions mean more data, and that has prompted a huge increase in customer experience metrics now available for businesses to aggregate, analyze and act on.
Using integration to harness this data has provided opportunities for businesses to construct a far more accurate and nuanced 360 degree customer view. Using these insights as the foundation for your customer experience strategy empowers a positive customer journey that is beneficial for the business and customer alike:
This opportunity for a 360 customer view hinges on the ability to capture all that data and then turn it into meaningful information—a challenge that is only set to grow alongside the huge data sets you rely on. Not only can smart integration support the increasing size of the data sets, it is also the best solution for handling the other main pain point a business will encounter with this data: it is generated from many disparate sources and systems.
Integration connects those systems to see how a customer journey truly unfolds across an omnichannel experience. This accurate “big picture” view is foundational to constructing the right solution for your customers.
While it is important for a business to see how a customer’s journey unfolds as they move between different channels, ideally the customers themselves should be only scarcely aware that the messaging is following them as they move. From promo email to Instagram feed to every one of the microservices powering your website, for them, it should feel like a seamless experience of your brand and your business.
Through integration, a customer’s historical interactions such as recent purchases, browsing on the site, even previously abandoned carts, can be drawn upon to deliver a personalized customer experience in real time that is tailored to the unique preferences, needs, and behaviors that are communicated via a collection of actions. Tools can be integrated that make use of this data to recommend products of interest, or offer discounts and loyalty rewards to increase engagement.
A well-executed personalized customer experience reduces the friction a customer might otherwise ensure in locating items they want, meaning fewer barriers between them and a successful purchase.
Every challenge can potentially present an opportunity. Though counterintuitive, integration can help elevate a customer’s experience with a business when the customer runs into issues. Through empowering a business’ employees (or even AI chatbots!) to quickly and easily access the information needed to further the customer journey, intelligent integration provides the flexibility to swiftly course-correct even within an omnichannel customer experience.
This can take the form of a customer service agent being able to pull up a client’s history to resolve a warranty issue without them having to dig for a physical receipt, or a store clerk being able to find a desired out-of-stock item and ship it to a customer’s home. This ability is incredibly valuable in preventing churn and can even turn potential negative client experiences into positive ones.
If you’re considering integration to maximize your customer experience solutions, partner with Digibee. With real-world experience helping businesses like Payless integrate the retail information systems of 200+ stores in 15 countries, we understand what you need to support your customers, whoever and wherever they are.
Because we know a business can’t just close their shop for updates, we have flexible integration solutions that allow you to run your legacy systems in tandem with new platforms for business continuity and a seamless customer experience.
Learn more about how Digibee can support customer experience management, book a demo to see our solution in action.
Our second annual survey of the enterprise integration market was published today, unveiling some intriguing insights and generating plenty of discussion.
In reviewing the survey results, I was struck by one constant. Most organizations now consider integration to be a core requirement for their digital transformation initiatives. In fact, coupled with cloud migration (a critical enabler in most modernization projects), digital transformation is the top integration objective in the survey, with almost 30% of respondents ranking it number one.
This is an amazing result, especially when you consider that just a few short years ago, the majority of enterprises were still on the fence about implementing iPaaS technology.
Cloud-to-cloud migration is exactly what it sounds like. It’s the process of moving digital assets (data, applications, etc.) from one cloud environment to another.
You’ve probably read more articles than you’d like to admit about the how, why, and when of moving your systems, data, and applications to the cloud. But cloud-to-cloud migration? Try finding information on that, and your searches will probably yield a lot fewer results.
Google search results on cloud-to-cloud migration tend to just ignore what it interprets as a redundant “cloud” in your query and steer you back toward the benefits of moving to the cloud and comparisons between public, private, and multi-cloud solutions.
Digging into types of cloud migration leads to disagreement on how many types there are – all focusing on types of migration from an on-premise system to the cloud. (Some mix of rehosting, redeployment, repackaging, refactoring, repurchasing, retiring, and retaining, for the record.)
So what is cloud-to-cloud migration? And why would anyone bother with it?
>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business.
If you’ve made the move to the cloud already, why would you bother doing it all again? Even the smoothest, most straightforward transitions still come with a level of stress. Who comes out on the other side of what can be a time-consuming, disruptive project and says, “hey, let’s do that again!”
Obviously, I’m exaggerating. No one is just moving all their data and applications from cloud to cloud in a high-stakes game of Frogger. But companies are embracing cloud-to-cloud migration – more often than you might think. Why?
Just about every company uses cloud in some form. And 87% of organizations have embraced a multi-cloud strategy. With multiple cloud environments on the go, the odds are high that sometimes you’ll move things from one to another, so cloud-to-cloud migration is more common than Google would lead you to believe. But what’s driving inter-cloud traffic?
Your business is continually evolving and changing – and what you need from a cloud environment will fluctuate too. Not every cloud environment is suitable for every use case (hence the widespread adoption of multi-cloud strategies), and that’s where cloud-to-cloud data migration comes in.
Cloud service providers have different strengths and varying weaknesses, just as you have varying priorities for the systems that live in the cloud. Those differences can make a strong business case for cloud-to-cloud migration.
Not all cloud environments are set up to support the same needs. A cloud solution designed for storing a lot of data that rarely moves won’t offer the best rates if you suddenly want to upload and download data regularly, for example.
Business-critical information or sensitive customer data must be stored in a cloud space that can meet specific standards. If the environment you started in can’t meet those requirements, you may opt to migrate vital data elsewhere.
The environment you chose for its high levels of security may not deliver the performance you need for heavily used applications. Any customer-facing systems you have hosted in the cloud need elevated levels of performance and minimal downtime.
If the features or capabilities of your cloud environment don’t match your changing goals or needs, you may have to find a new solution. The need for more control, increased transparency, or better integration between systems all fall into this category.
Because cloud-to-cloud migration doesn’t come with any of the issues that can affect on-premise-to-cloud migrations, many of the challenges typically associated with migration don’t apply. You’ve (presumably) already developed a cloud strategy and laid out what you hope to achieve with migration. You understand cost, security and compliance, and technical needs, and hopefully, secured organizational buy-in for use of the cloud. But that doesn’t mean moving from one cloud to another is guaranteed to be hassle-free.
The main challenges associated with cloud-to-cloud migration are both related to the basic concept of change, and the pain it can induce:
There are compelling reasons to support cloud migration – and there are challenges that make the process unappealing. If you’ve decided, for whatever reason, that moving assets from your existing cloud environment to a new digital space is right for you, there are steps you can take to minimize pain and disruption. Conveniently, most of these steps are the same ones you took (or should have taken) when you migrated to the cloud in the first place:
At Digibee, we’ve developed a low-code iPaaS that can help you make cloud-to-cloud migration easy and pain-free. The flexible, scalable and reusable elements of Digibee iPaaS ensures that moves to the cloud, or migrations from cloud to cloud, happen seamlessly.
See for yourself. Give us your cloud to cloud use case scenario, and book a no-obligation demo (your choice of 15, 30, or 60 minutes) to learn how our solution can simplify the migration process.
If your company went through a digital transformation during your tenure, and it was a huge painful and complicated affair for everyone involved, we have some unwelcome news for you… you should consider doing it again, and sooner rather than later.
This suggestion doesn’t come from some digital schadenfreude, rather because many businesses should be examining a transformation to composable enterprise architecture for the sake of their long-term success in the face of an ever-changing technological landscape. In this blog, we aim to detail the benefits of such a strategy, and advice on taking pain, time and expense out of the process.
At this point, composable architecture has been a hot topic for several years now, and has proved itself to be much more than some passing fad. Gartner reported back in 2020 that “Composable Commerce Must Be Adopted for the Future of Applications”, and continues to highlight its importance. In Gartner’s Top Technology Trends of 2023, composability is an assumed part of the technology landscape.
>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business.
Interview with executive Bob Howland providing insights about leadership and change management from his 20+ years in the e-commerce space.
Are you a retailer struggling to find the best solution for your IT integration? You need something that is agile enough to scale during peak periods and retract during slower cycles–a workable system that will integrate legacy on-premises architecture with cloud-based applications.
Most importantly, you need IT infrastructure that delivers the best omni-channel customer experience (CX) while managing massive levels of big data across multiple locations. That’s a tall order. No wonder it’s keeping you up at night. Your decision will have lasting effects on your company. The wrong move could hit the bottom line hard.
It’s time to ease the pressure. These days, IT integration solutions are flexible enough to make it easy on you and your entire IT team. Enterprise integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) solutions allow retailers to integrate all types of IT infrastructure, whether on-premises solutions, cloud-based applications, or hybrid systems.
The past shortcomings of legacy point-to-point (P2P) solutions and on-premises enterprise service bus (ESB) integration models don’t have to limit your IT architecture anymore.
>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business.
You may be working with legacy P2P solutions that only connect two applications directly, so you’re dealing with so-called ‘spaghetti code’ with complex intertwined systems that don’t have a central way to communicate with each other.
Maybe you have a more recent system, if by recent you mean the 1990s, when ESBs came onto the scene as the newest integration tool. Sure, ESBs offer more functionality than P2P models, because the bus-like hub structure of an ESB enables connections with multiple applications. However, technology has come a long way since the ‘90s. ESBs were originally developed before cloud-based applications existed and are usually limited to on-premises architecture since they don’t work well with cloud-centric or hybrid systems.
ESBs are also expensive and take a lot of time to establish because IT experts often need specialized training or certification to develop and maintain ESB integration systems.
Lastly, the limited capabilities of P2P and ESB methods reduce a retailer’s access to and use of big data, or ad-hoc queries based on that data, which are critical to retailers who want to provide a high-level omni-channel customer experience (CX).
An enterprise integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) is more agile than traditional P2P or ESB integration models. An iPaaS solution has the capability to connect on-premises, cloud-based, and hybrid application systems, providing much more flexibility, functionality, and scalability than a P2P or ESB model.
An iPaaS solution is also intuitive, so rather than needing high-level IT experts writing professional code (pro-code) for P2P or ESB models; all levels of IT staff can manage a low-code iPaaS platform with very little training required. You can make a direct comparison of pro-code versus low-code models to discover the best solution for your integration strategy.
A subscription-based iPaaS model is less expensive, more flexible, and much more scalable than legacy P2P or ESB methods. Plus, implementation is significantly faster with a cloud-centric iPaaS versus other integration methods, helping retailers gain faster time to value with IT integrations.
Digibee provides a fast and streamlined IT integration experience. Digibee’s easy-to-use enterprise iPaaS is a cloud-native, enterprise-ready integration platform that accelerates time-to-value, mitigates risks, and helps reduce IT costs. Discover how the efficiency and agility of Digibee’s iPaaS delivered immediate results for international retailers.
Digibee effectively integrated more than 14 legacy systems for the largest manufacturer of baked goods in Brazil. Bauducco Foods has five manufacturing units, 12 branches, and seven distribution centers. Its retail division, Casa Bauducco, has more than 80 stores, with more than 180,000 points of sale in Brazil.
Digibee’s iPaaS integration implementation instantly connected and streamlined Bauducco’s existing cloud-based and legacy systems, eliminated manual inputs and data errors, managed and reduced risks, and provided greater stability throughout the IT environment. Digibee did all of this with zero downtime and a 30% reduction in project time and cost.
Digibee also integrated a secure iPaaS e-commerce platform for global shoe retailer Payless Shoes across more than 200 stores in 15 countries. The implementation took less than 30 days, despite each country having different fiscal and legal requirements. The iPaaS system easily handles seasonal spikes for the busy retailer, and provides better efficiency, transparency and security across the retail enterprise.
Digibee’s subscription-based iPaaS will connect all of your legacy P2P and ESB systems as well as any cloud-based applications. It also streamlines your operation, supporting an omni-channel CX, unlocking big data capabilities, easing pressure on your IT team, reducing integration costs, and improving your return on investment (ROI). What are you waiting for?
Discover the Digibee difference. Learn how to integrate and modernize your enterprise with Digibee’s integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS). Book your choice of a discovery call (15 minutes), custom demo (30 minutes), or a deep dive (60 minutes) to learn more.
Composable commerce is a concept that has gained substantial popularity in the last several years, and is poised to be one of the critical business differentiators in the year ahead for retailers. While the concept of composability fundamentally resonates with IT professionals, the devil is in the details (as it always is).
How do you define composability when specifically applied to ecommerce and retail tech? How do you define the benefits of composable commerce – and the risks of not moving towards composability?
And most importantly, what can you actually do today that will start the transformation from monolithic to composable?
>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business.
In contrast to the more traditional monolithic commerce platforms that package every part of a digital commerce solution into one large computing network, composable commerce runs on many microservices, each handling a distinct system function.
It usually incorporates headless commerce, which separates the front-end presentation layer from the back-end ecommerce functionality, and then further subdivides the back-end into separate microservices that each perform a discrete task such as inventory management or a payment gateway.
That’s the what, here’s the why: breaking a system down into these separate microservices gives businesses freedom to select the best individual components for their specific business needs, and the flexibility to easily modify or swap them out in the future without serious rework needed to the rest of the system.
This has never been more critical than it is today. No industry has withstood the challenges of change more than retail has over the past few years. And we all know that rapid change is now a constant. The retail organizations that are “winning” are the ones who can adapt quickly, as are the ones that are farther along the path to Digital Transformation.
Let’s dig into the role composability can play in 2023.
To be successful, not only must each individual microservice be well-thought-out, but also how it communicates with every other microservice within the system.
Without intelligent ecommerce integration, this communication between components has to be managed at an incredibly granular level, exposing a business to several serious complications in the following ways:
In composable commerce, a typical customer journey will touch upon many different microservices, often even crossing different online channels. Without integration, your customer’s journey can become disjointed and lead to frustration and disappointment for them, and missed opportunities for you.
For example, if your CRM and email marketing components aren’t aligned, prospects may receive an email that alerts them of a sale that their region is ineligible for. If inventory management isn’t updating your ecommerce platform in real time they could purchase an item that is out of stock and the order then has to be canceled.
A composable system has a lot of little things going on at once, and without strong integration a company can quickly find themselves in a data situation where they “can’t see the forest for the trees”. This leaves them at a severe disadvantage when trying to make business decisions that provide true customer value.
Essentially this is the business-facing version of the “Not-so-seamless customer experience,” where the business has limited insight into their customer’s overall journey, and can only see these interactions at a component level.
The ability to quickly assemble (and reassemble) the best components for your business needs is one of the primary reasons to choose a composable commerce architecture. As you add or remove technologies to compete where your customers are, speed and flexibility are key. This is also true of partners. As you integrate with suppliers, marketplaces and other platforms and software to advance your digital strategy, your integration ducks need to be in a row.
This required adaptability is easily eroded without ecommerce data integration. Managing a network of custom built integrations built on legacy technologies is time consuming, complicated, and prone to unforeseen errors.
The platform you choose for integration needs to prevent the above scenarios through simultaneously addressing the volume of discrete microservices to manage, and maintaining the flexibility and adaptability so integral to the composable commerce approach.
Look for an integration platform that is:
The core philosophy of composable architecture is one that Digibee has truly taken to heart. Our modular iPaaS is purpose-built to increase freedom and adaptability to support a composable commerce system, or even to support your transition to one.
If you’re interested in how Digibee can help your organization evolve to a modular IT environment, we’d be happy to show you how. Book your choice of a 15-minute discovery call, 30-minute custom demo, or a 60-minute deep dive to learn more.
Business and IT leaders struggle with complex – and often pricey – IT decisions that have significant and lasting effects on their companies. The IT landscape is constantly changing, so it can be difficult to know what’s best for right now and for the future. The wrong decision could hit a company’s bottom line hard and cause ongoing headaches that are entirely avoidable.
This article compares Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) models with integration-as-a-service (iPaaS) solutions for today’s integration needs. For a fair comparison, first, you should understand the difference between ESB and iPaaS.
>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business.
A lot of buzz words get bandied about in business meetings, and especially around tech topics it can be hard to a) keep up and b) keep it straight. So if you are feeling a little self-conscious about having to google what these terms really mean, just know that the problem isn’t you.
Any technology term is relatively young and the meaning will naturally shift or be refined over time. Both the practices of researching terms and independently asking the person you are working with to define how they use terms are integral for meaningful communication between the business and technology sides of any company.
In this blog post we will explore several common terms relating to digital commerce infrastructure:
>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business.
A traditional monolithic architecture essentially packages every part of an application into one large computing network. In today’s cloud-centric and platform as a service world, this notion sounds a bit archaic. In its defense, monolithic architecture is not an entirely ancient relic; it still provides an easy solution that continues to work for many companies, and there are many “out of the box” options available.
“Monolithic” derives from the Ancient Greek word μονόλιθος (monólithos), from μόνος (mónos) meaning “one” or “single” and λίθος (líthos) meaning “stone”. While we’re confident that even the most change-resistant IT person isn’t running your website on anything made of stone, it is a great visual for the concepts that underpin monolithic architecture in technology.
The main difficulty that arises for those with a monolithic system is adaptability. Making a change to a monolithic system is about as impossible as trying to dig something out of the bottom of a large suitcase while keeping your clothes folded. Updating or even just maintaining a monolithic system can put pressure on your personnel, who have to constantly dig through legacy code to keep the system running.
Headless commerce architecture is built in a way where the back-end or server-side logic has been decoupled from the front end user interface. In this architecture type, the back-end system connects to your user interface through APIs that are typically RESTful APIs that expose data in a standardized way, allowing them to be consumed by a variety of different clients and used for a variety of business use cases. Monolithic architecture also uses APIs, but by contrast they are built to be tightly coupled with that system’s back-end, and are designed to execute very specific business use cases.
What are the advantages of headless architectures? When building a front end interface with headless, developers are able to maintain a higher level of freedom to create customized user experiences without having to be concerned about the intricacies of the back-end. Headless back-end systems can also be used simultaneously by multiple client applications, so a website, a mobile app, a kiosk and a chatbot can all share the same underlying system without causing issues between them. Ultimately, this promises more flexibility as the retail technology landscape continues to evolve, and ensures better visibility and connectedness of data sources as retailers attempt to execute on the omnichannel experience for customers and prospective customers alike.
Composable commerce architecture emphasizes the use of interchangeable and independent components – or microservices. These services can include everything from inventory management and product searches, to shopping carts and payment vendors. By breaking down a solution into these discrete and independent services, a business can easily swap out or re-work a service without major risk to the system as a whole.
This modularity lends an enormous amount of flexibility to a business, and allows it to adapt quicker than their monolithic competitors to new technologies as they become available. Like headless commerce, these modules are typically linked through RESTful APIs that expose data from one microservice to another.
“In turbulent times, composable business principles help organizations master the accelerated change that is essential for business resilience and growth. Without it, modern organizations risk losing their market momentum and customer loyalty.”
David Groombridge, Research Vice President, Gartner
This high level of flexibility does come with some additional considerations for the team. Unlike monolithic “out of the box” solution options, a composable commerce site is bespoke, and requires developers to build. Managing numerous microservices and APIs can also be challenging, and a comprehensive approach for how to connect and monitor them needs to not only be implemented, but kept up to date with each change to the system.
There really is no “vs” when it comes to composable commerce and headless commerce, they have a substantial amount of overlap as they both rely on RESTful APIs to link different parts of their respective systems together.
Whether headless commerce is composable is essentially reliant on whether its APIs and services are designed in a way that is truly modular and reusable. If a website has been built with the back and front end decoupled but the APIs are built to specifically work only for that system’s back-end then it can be considered headless, but not composable.
The short answer is no, because technically there is no requirement for a composable architecture to even have a front-end interface, but the longer answer is that they often are as a headless front-end can provide the modularity needed to support composable commerce.
The conversations about innovation for most digital commerce companies today need to encompass their approach to technology architecture as a whole, but also be able to zoom in and understand how each piece of that system would fit together to meet the business needs.
With so much important data being generated, whatever approach to your system architecture you adopt needs to be able to capture that data in a way that adds value to your business. This is where e-commerce integration comes in.
Digibee has been built to fully support many approaches to technical architecture. Whether you are working with a fully composable commerce system, or just starting the journey of migrating away from your monolithic e-commerce, we can help. Our low-code eiPaaS scales quickly and easily to integrate all your independent services thanks to our reusable Digibee capsules, giving you full flexibility to make the most of your system data.
If you’re interested in how Digibee can help your organization evolve to a modular IT environment, we’d be happy to show you how. Book your choice of a 15-minute discovery call, 30-minute custom demo, or a 60-minute deep dive to learn more.
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