The Forrester Technology and Data Strategy event in Austin TX occurred earlier this month. Our team was especially pleased to attend and co-present with Alec Irwin, lead integration developer at Johnson Brothers, a prominent wine, beer, and spirits distributor in the US.
Digibee has partnered with Johnson Brothers on a significant enterprise integration implementation, helping the company transition from its on-premises solution (in place for six years) to Digibee’s born in the cloud iPaaS.
The work is particularly exciting in that we’ve achieved such impressive results. For example, modernizing six years of on-premises integrations to Digibee’s iPaaS in less than six months. Plus, the implementation was 70% faster versus upgrading to the new version of the legacy product.
Integration has become an essential component for businesses to achieve their strategic goals. But, not all integration solutions are the same. Digibee’s innovative iPaaS solution offers essential benefits that traditional integration providers can’t match.
Check out this infographic highlighting six ways leveraging Digibee’s platform can support your digital transformation strategy – saving you time, money, resources, and frustration.
For many companies, enterprise integration is an essential service. Relied upon to keep the business connected, the technology enables streamlined functionality across IT systems and processes. With a real-time, big picture view of the business, organizations respond with agility to changes in the market while optimizing efficiencies (and profitability).
But as with any enterprise solution, there is always a breaking point where the cost of a product outweighs its benefit to the business. For many MuleSoft customers, the ongoing investment simply to use the product is becoming untenable, siphoning IT budget and resources from higher value work. Let’s take a closer look.
More and more enterprises are prioritizing digital transformation and cloud migration initiatives to modernize their operations. That’s when adopting an integration strategy becomes crucial. However, finding the right integration tool can be daunting.
Do your professional developers spend a lot of time writing tedious code to support your MuleSoft implementation? Are you frustrated to see precious bandwidth diverted for training and certification simply so your team can use the integration technology that’s meant to serve them?
Well, get in line. If your business relies on MuleSoft to support your integration strategy, it could be a long (and expensive) wait.
Digibee debuted in North America in early 2022, fresh off our series A raise ($25M). And although we hit the ground running, like any young tech company offering a new way to do an old thing, getting the market to notice was an uphill battle.
Yes, there were low-code integration solutions already on the market, but Digibee introduced prepackaged, reusable capsules, providing unprecedented efficiencies in how companies integrate.
Instead of expecting our customers to build API triggers from the ground up, we customized the process, providing a collection of prebuilt options for an even faster time to value. Plus we deliver one of the very best user experiences in the business, bar none.
Since those early days, we’ve hit a lot of new and impressive milestones. Along with an incredible 70% close rate on our proofs-of concept, we’re building new partnerships with customers every day. Our biggest accomplishment so far? A crazy successful Series B raise ($60M) in June 2023.
After plenty of hard work and many impressive achievements, I think it’s safe to say that Digibee has finally, officially, arrived.
>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business.
You Know You’ve Arrived When…
In technology, validation comes in different forms. First there is the inspiration and trust we receive from our customers. We are fortunate to work with creative organizations across many different industries that, like Digibee, are working hard to be the best they can be.
Second is the confidence and trust we inspire in our investors. Talk about putting your money where your mouth is! Starting with our $6M seed round in February, 2019, a $25M Series A round in early 2022, and our amazing $60M Series B round just a few months ago. Smart and successful investors truly believe in Digibee, helping us achieve total funding of over $90M. Trust personified.
Then there are the industry experts, the analysts and insiders who leverage years of experience to forecast where technology is going (and who’s helping to get it there). While large, traditional enterprise software companies may be inured to analyst coverage, for Digibee, this form of recognition serves as a tangible proof point that the hard work we’re doing is paying off.
Many companies face ongoing challenges even after investing heavily in traditional iPaaS systems such as MuleSoft. And we’re not talking peanuts. For most enterprises it’s a significant investment, with integration spend estimated at $720 billion to $1.12 trillion globally in 2023.
Even after paying top dollar for MuleSoft, including for support and maintenance, the business must also pay to certify their developers, an ongoing investment required simply so you can continue using the software.
>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business.
Digital transformation and architecture modernization have become a top priority for organizations as the shift to omnichannel and digital-first strategies continues to accelerate. Integration plays a key role in this trend, and you’ve probably been bombarded with messaging on the importance of the right integration strategy.
Point-to-point integration, APIs, ESBs, iPaaS – the options can be confusing and differentiating between them can be difficult. The proliferation of “as-a-service” business models means iPaaS at least sounds slightly familiar. But what is an iPaaS anyway?
>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business.
The manufacturing sector has long been a leader in innovation. The industrial revolution over a century ago centered on the adoption of mechanical advances to produce items at speeds and volumes that would have been previously unimaginable.
Henry Ford’s concept of the assembly line in the 1910’s, Toyota’s Kanban methodology introduced in the 1940’s and Kaizen in the 1980’s, and Motorola’s development of Six Sigma in the 1990’s are additional revolutionary principles established by manufacturing, then adopted by many other industries.
In 2023, manufacturing challenges center upon computer integrated manufacturing and data proliferation.
Earlier this year we conducted the Digibee 2023 State of Enterprise Integration survey, collecting insights from more than one thousand CTOs, CIOs, system architects, and web developers across several key industries such as Manufacturing, Finance, and Retail.
Several overarching themes emerged representing the goals and challenges experienced by all industries, where other areas showed more industry-specific nuances. In this blog post we examine the insights garnered specifically from Manufacturing and the trends the report uncovered.
>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business.
Integration Objectives in Manufacturing
Not unlike the industrial revolution, modern advances in technology have spurred huge leaps in innovation, forcing manufacturers to adapt or risk losing their competitive advantage. New industry trends include servitization, hyper-automation, and sustainability, with all companies striving to become more data-driven due to rapid adoption of connected devices.
The Digibee State of Enterprise Integration Report findings indicate the adoption of these new trends and related pressures are critical drivers behind enterprise integration within the manufacturing sector:
1. Improve Security, Reliability, and Governance
When survey respondents were asked about goals for integration, Improving Security, Reliability, and Governance ranked 4th across all industries for integration goals, but by contrast it represents the top priority for the manufacturing sector in 2023. The root cause of this concern is the vast array of valuable private data manufacturing systems now handle –everything from the Intellectual Property behind the products being made to the personal information of the employees –requiring many points of access to be secured within Integrated manufacturing solutions.
Businesses are no longer stand-alone operations; they are components of critical infrastructures and supply chains, which significantly increases their exposure to risks.
While security concerns have drastically changed for manufacturing technology in recent years, the pursuit of higher reliability, efficiency, and predictability within manufacturing goes back as far as the industry itself.
Once an item has been manufactured, there is no “undo” button that restores the valuable raw materials used to make it. For this reason, reliability in manufacturing control systems will always be a top concern compared to industries that do not produce physical products. Integration is a priority for reliability as it supports real-time data visibility and monitoring to ensure consistency and accuracy throughout manufacturing execution systems at all stages.
Improvements in governance are built upon insights gained from the integration of different systems within the manufacturing management system. With well-integrated systems, an overview of the internal workings is monitored in real-time to meet standards, and to reduce anomalies or mistakes that jeopardize quality, security, compliance, and safety.
2. Improve/Enhance Business Analytics and Decision-Making
Better governance results in higher quality data, which in turn supports business analytics and decision-making.
With retailers prioritizing improved time to market in the survey, increased pressure will be placed on some manufacturers to produce new products faster.
Retail Demand Forecasting draws upon business analytics to uncover buying patterns to predict future sales. To keep ahead of the curve, a similar integrated infrastructure must be adopted by manufacturers.
Enhanced business analytics help inform demand, supporting supply chain management and just-in-time inventory practices. These are top of mind concerns, with many manufacturers still recovering from the crippling supply-chain issues experienced during the pandemic.
Enterprise integration supports the unification of data from different applications across the operation, streamlining data access and analytics. Manufacturers are leveraging these valuable stores of data to support and help guide the business.
Just as governance requirements rely on business analytics, decision-making is increasingly reliant on automation and AI within integrated manufacturing systems.
Better manufacturing data integration makes it easier to manage and organize higher volumes of information. Unfortunately these large data stores are a barrier for less technologically-sophisticated businesses that rely on legacy systems and manual workflows that 74% of manufacturers must still rely upon.
AI allows manufacturers to extract significant value from the data generated, recognizing patterns within unstructured data and creating models for future outcomes.
The possibilities go well beyond the obvious use-case of predicting future sales and extracting data from manufacturing software systems; innovative companies have employed tools based solely on visual monitoring, such as ŠKODA’s Magic Eye project, to flag and predict undesirable conditions on their EHB3 conveyor.
AI also enables a host of innovative manufacturing capabilities, including automation.
Meet All of Your Integration Goals with Digibee’s iPaaS
Computer integrated manufacturing provides the solid digital foundation needed to adapt to the industry trends and pressures of the modern world. Streamlining data storage and access with Digibee gets the most out of your manufacturing system, whether the challenges you face are at the executive offices or on the factory floor.
Digibee’s intuitive monitoring systems and platform security features allow you to safely connect and integrate with partner and customer systems, for a real-time operation and increased efficiencies.
Sometimes it’s not easy being a MuleSoft customer. While we’ve never been there, plenty of our customers have.
The licensing model is expensive, with support and maintenance also taking big bites from the bottom line. Training (or hiring) people to work with the technology is another kick in the pants, with special certifications and courses chewing up IT budgets and sidelining the only people able to make MuleSoft work. According to our annual survey, maintenance and training are top of the list for non-iPaaS integration budgets, eating up almost 40% of the spend. So we’re not talking peanuts.
The technology, back in its heyday, was pretty amazing, delivering integration capabilities for SaaS, on-premises software, legacy systems, and other platforms. But technology from the early 2000s is not sufficient for organizations that need meaningful change. Today, enterprise integration is an enabler of innovation and agility. If it’s constraining the business, then it’s not doing its job.
>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business.
There are countless articles on how to build a meaningful customer experience strategy, whether specifically in ecommerce or in any type of selling environment. And while we all strive to continuously, proactively add technologies and process improvements designed to enhance the experience of our customers, sometimes a cautionary tale – learning what not to do – can be particularly insightful.
Everyone has been in the role of consumer, so it’s not a stretch to put yourself in your customers’ shoes. What excites you? What entices you to buy? What prompts you to leave a 1-star review or quit on a sale before it’s final?
Regardless of what’s being sold – from souvenir t-shirts to private jets – the desired experience is essentially the same. In this blog, we share a true narrative customer experience gone wrong, and tips on how to avoid this sort of scenario.
>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business.
Integration and CX in Ecommerce
Integration underpins successful modern digital ecommerce systems. It allows companies increased freedom to create a seamless omnichannel customer experience through incorporating many specialized tools and platforms.
While integration provides the means for building the best customer experience, looking at the system from the outside, as the customer experiences it, often provides key insights on which areas to focus integration efforts.
How to Improve Customer Experience
The following experience happened several years ago, and the retailer in question has improved their customer experience significantly since. But as far as bad digital customer experiences go, this serves as a cautionary tale, particularly as retailers are increasingly dependent on so many technologies to act as one cohesive unit in delivery of customer experience.
Eliminating Barriers
Suitcase Shopping
Chapter 1:
I wanted to buy a new carry-on suitcase. It had to be the right size for an international flight, and I was hoping for a silver color to match my other luggage.
As luck would have it, I received an email that a large national retailer was having an amazing one-day 70% off sale on luggage. I excitedly clicked through to their website.
Fifteen long seconds later the home page loaded. Annoying since a) that’s really slow and b) I clicked on a CTA for the sale, so why did I land on the home page? I spent some time searching for the luggage sale listing and the page began to load.
And then the server crashed.
This retailer got it right – the right buyer with the right offer at the right time. Success! Then the experience immediately went awry.
As Forbes succinctly points out, convenience is one of the biggest differences between in-store and online shopping. Each negative experience chips away at this primary benefit ecommerce is meant to provide.
Common barriers include:
Slow response times
Unnecessary steps to reach goals
With technology advances such as composable architecture, there are few excuses for anything other than a blazing fast user interface, even at peak times. Don’t make it easier for your customer to support your competitor instead of you. With an estimated 12-24 million ecommerce sites globally, there are plenty of alternatives even for niche businesses!
Set Clear Expectations
Suitcase Shopping
Chapter 2:
Had I been only casually interested in a suitcase, I would have bounced off the site, but I had a specific trip coming up, so I stuck with it. I kept refreshing the page, and eventually it loaded once more.
After a few more crashes I located a silver carry-on in the listing page and clicked through to the details page. ‘SOLD OUT’ it said. I tried a few more silver suitcases with the same result before finally finding one in stock.
It was the right dimensions, but on the details page it was listed as blue, though only pictured in red. At 70% off I opted to settle for this mystery color so I clicked ‘Buy Now’ and got through the purchase process as fast as that suffering server would allow.
Missing, incorrect, or unclear information about the products or services you provide risks:
Appearing professionally incompetent
Eroding customer confidence in your ability as a retailer
Customer assumptions about what something is or does, resulting in disappointment
The color of a suitcase is a minor issue, but these small inconsistencies create uncertainty, impacting the decision to buy. If a business doesn’t know exactly what they are selling, what else don’t they know?
Providing high-quality information empowers the customer to make an informed decision, eliminating confusion or disappointment and the negative reviews and product returns that result. Recent technology advances such as headless commerce can help connect real time inventory with user interfaces, as long as it’s all integrated seamlessly.
Every User is Unique
Suitcase Shopping
Chapter 3:
A few minutes later I started to have some blue/red suitcase buyer’s remorse.
I navigated back to the suitcase listings page and (once again between crashes/slow loading/out of stock items) located a silver suitcase I preferred. I successfully purchased this silver suitcase and then proceeded to cancel my order of the blue/red suitcase.
A few hours later and I still hadn’t received an order cancellation confirmation, so I begrudgingly got on a call with customer service. After about an hour of listening to hold music I was told that everything with my order and cancellation was fine.
THREE DAYS later, the company canceled the silver suitcase order due to an inventory issue. Five days later the “Canceled” blue/red suitcase arrived at my door. Oh, and it was green.
A seamless customer service experience is a hallmark of modern ecommerce. But when you fail in this arena, the negative impact to the customer relationship is significant, indicating:
A lack of concern in meeting your customers’ needs once the sale is complete
No desire to foster an ongoing (and positive) relationship with the people who support your business
Do everything possible to build a robust and enduring customer experience, but remember the CX journey is never over. Every interaction matters, pre-sale, shopping, and post-sale.
If a company exceeds expectations throughout, especially in the conversion of an unhappy customer to a satisfied customer, your shoppers will remain loyal to your brand.
Provide a personalized customer experience where people can chart their own course and access what they need quickly and easily. Draw upon a well-integrated system and advances in AI and automation to support omnichannel customer experiences, and equip your support team with all available system knowledge so they can remediate issues quickly.
How to Support Your Customers with Digibee
We know you work hard to put your customers first, and at Digibee we do the same for you. Our integration platform is reliable, scalable and customizable, giving you the tools needed to build the best experiences for your customers and internal teams.
For more insight on how to keep CX and ecommerce running smoothly in the face of constant change, listen to episode 17 from our Integration Redesigned podcast series, as Bob Howland from Dawn Foods and Cait Porte of Digibee discuss change management and collaboration.
Or episode 16, where Cait and ecommerce executive Chris Muscut discuss the latest trends in retail and how businesses can navigate the ever-changing technological landscape to meet consumer needs.
Let your peak times equal more happy customers (and profits) versus frustration, outages, and unwanted green suitcases.
If you’re interested in how Digibee can help your organization evolve your customer experience, 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.
The Digibee State of Enterprise Integration survey was carried out earlier this year, collecting input and opinions from one thousand CTOs, CIOs, system architects, and web developers in North America.
One very interesting area of insight is the motivation of enterprises that are initiating enterprise integration. Based on answers from Finance respondents, top objectives for integration rank as follows:
Migrate to/upgrade cloud, digital transformation
Improve data security
Enable automation and AI
Let’s dig into the data.
>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business.
1. The Cloud & Digital Transformation
According to 32% of the respondents, cloud/digital transformation is the top integration objective for Finance organizations. This makes a lot of sense, especially when you consider the criticality of modernization and innovation within an industry undergoing rapid change.
Finance is a long-established market segment where it’s not uncommon to find legacy, non-cloud native technologies still in use. Rather than advancing the digital strategies critical to the growth of the company, these applications hold it back.
For some organizations, a first step toward the future is often a first step to the cloud. Many Digibee customers in the finance sector implement enterprise integration to support their cloud initiatives, reflecting a growing trend within the industry. In fact, according to a survey by Google Cloud and Harris Poll, 83% of financial services companies are using the public cloud in some form.
With a properly connected environment, Finance companies reap all of the rewards associated with digital transformation, including greater agility, real-time information, and a truly omni-channel and personalized customer experience.
“Today, succeeding in Finance requires a unique combination of creativity and caution. Without a truly connected environment, financial organizations are unable to innovate, curtailing their efforts to digitally transform the business.”
Finance organizations deal with a complicated security landscape, beholden to a range of regulatory bodies concerned with privacy, disclosure, fraud prevention, anti-money laundering, anti-terrorism, and other rules and regulations.
Any company providing financial services, from a loan company to a brokerage firm, must have the proper safeguards in place to protect its customers and the business.
Failure to deliver on this front is catastrophic to the reputation of the company, breaching customer loyalty and trust, and impacting the business for the long term. For context, the financial sector experienced the second highest number of data breaches in 2022, second only to the government.
As a finance organization progresses in its digital transformation, the proliferation of data increases. Cloud-based platforms and infrastructure rely on connected devices, each generating always-on data streams. CRM and other enterprise systems also collect data from a wider range of sources, increasing the size of these databases.
Without an integration strategy in place, Finance organizations must deal with these ever-growing and multiple stores of siloed data individually. Enterprise integration helps to consolidate the data, streamlining security protocols, permissions, and data access for stronger data security across the operation. It also optimizes analytics and other insights the company can extract from the information.
3. Enable Automation and AI
29% of respondents placed automation and AI on their top three list. This is a natural progression. Once finance organizations have their cloud and data security houses in order, it’s finally time to innovate!
For what many consider a more traditional space, sometimes slow to adopt new technologies out of a culture of caution, Finance organizations are rapid adopters of AI, especially chatbots. The technology improves customer service while automating repetitive tasks, increasing efficiencies in call centers, and gaining real-time insights from the data these interactions generate.
Along with streamlining the customer experience, AI enables the business to make informed decisions about risk and other financial considerations. As a result, the decision-making process becomes more efficient and accurate.
AI is also a game-changer when it comes to fraud and other security issues. For example, an AI-powered anti-fraud engine developed by KPMG in a recent collaboration, reduces fraudulent transactions by up to 40%.
Automation is synonymous with AI, a valuable capability that delivers meaningful benefits across the operation, including increased accuracy, decreased human error, and a more responsive (and faster) customer experience.
Ironically, artificial intelligence can help redefine and restore personalized experiences that build trust for consumers and small business owners.
Achieve Your Business Objectives with Digibee’s iPaaS
Digibee’s iPaaS technology is low-code and cloud-native, enabling you to seamlessly connect all of the dots (and your IT infrastructure) so you can achieve your digital transformation objectives.
Better governance results in higher quality data, which in turn supports business analytics and decision-making. 
According to 32% of the respondents, cloud/digital transformation is the top integration objective for Finance organizations. This makes a lot of sense, especially when you consider the criticality of modernization and innovation within an industry undergoing rapid change.
Finance organizations deal with a complicated security landscape, beholden to a range of regulatory bodies concerned with privacy, disclosure, fraud prevention, anti-money laundering, anti-terrorism, and other rules and regulations.
29% of respondents placed automation and AI on their top three list. This is a natural progression. Once finance organizations have their cloud and data security houses in order, it’s finally time to innovate!