Today’s business data ecosystem is a network of customers and partners communicating continuously with each other. The traditional way to do this is by establishing a business-to-business (B2B) relationship. The B2B communication requires a formal agreement between the entities. Then the two sides must agree on the formatting of messages. As a result, service delivery is often delayed by a few months. Due to the complexity, enterprises rely on IT staff to manage this data exchange between partners. The result is a slow order-to-cash process, poor customer experience, loss of market share, and delayed revenue.
The Azure platform offers a wealth of services for partners to enhance, extend, and build industry solutions. Here we describe how one Microsoft partner uses Azure to solve a unique problem.
B2B in need of a makeover
In today’s world, the traditional way of doing B2B is one area ripe for improvement. The old-fashioned delays and frustrating experiences make an enterprise tough to do business with. That experience can lead to competitors gaining an advantage if they offer better agility and faster partner onboarding. Adeptia is a Microsoft partner that is working to accelerate communication between businesses. Their solution promises to speed the integration between entities and regain the advantage.
Complexity is commonplace
A complex business data ecosystem of partners and customers requires IT to build data connections between the enterprise and its partners and customers. This leads to point-to-point connections that are hard to manage and require specific IT skills. As a result, an enterprise takes time to onboard business data with its partners and customers, which causes low agility and delays in delivering services. When time matters, the revenue stream takes a hit.
The complexity takes its toll in other ways. The process is built on a code-intensive data exchange approach. As this has been the norm for a long time, customers and partners have simply endured the painful process. However, it seems anachronistic in this point.
A modern self-service approach
The Adeptia Connect solution is an Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) business application, not a developer tool. As such, the app modernizes the onboarding experience with a self-service approach. As implied, users can initiate new processes on their own, on an as-needed basis. This enables business and operational users to onboard customer and partner data anytime, anywhere without relying on IT staff for building connections leaving them free for other tasks.
Benefits
When you accelerate business data onboarding through self-service, you accelerate service delivery. Immediately, you reduce the time-to-revenue. Best of all, it provides an improved customer experience by making an enterprise easy to do business with. Through this, enterprises build a better relationship with their customers and partners and retain their market share. They succeed by providing rapid value to their customer and partner ecosystem.
The graphic shows the flow of data between partners and customers with an enterprise—with Adeptia in the middle.
In summary, the benefits of this solution include:
- A self-service approach that saves time.
- The release of IT resources from low level integration, freeing them up for other tasks.
- The semantics of a business application—easier to understand than a development tool.
- An acceleration of service delivery to fast forward revenues.
- A delightful customer experience.
- Efficient interactions with the enterprise that encourages return business.
Collectively, these competitive advantages make the enterprise more agile, and help win a larger market share.
How is Azure used in the solution?
- The Adeptia Connect Virtual Machine is hosted on an Azure Virtual Machine, benefitting from Microsoft Azure’s worldwide presence and extensive compliance portfolio.
- Clients can connect to Azure SQL Database, also hosted on Azure.
- Data is ingested by Azure Data Lake and can be moved to Blob Storage for archiving.
Next steps
- To learn more about other healthcare solutions, go to the Azure for health page.
- To find out more about this solution, go to the Azure Marketplace listing for Adeptia Connect, and click Contact me.