When you have millions of customers worldwide that need to seamlessly connect and exchange information every day, data integration becomes a major challenge. Global software company, SAP Ariba, found itself in exactly this situation. Its solution was to move to Integration Managed Services on the OpenText™ Business Network. Here’s why.
In a recent Forrester report, 80% of companies said that the volume and variety of data they have to work with has increased and 65% said the number of applications they used in their business had spiked. The result was that fully 93% of companies felt the operational and technical challenges of their integration strategies had led directly to serious business implications.
Forrester suggested that the scale and complexity of the integration challenge should encourage organizations to explore a managed services approach. The report states: “If integration and data management are becoming more strategic, and you have difficulty sourcing skilled resources, it’s time to move beyond simple outsourcing or hosted services and consider strategic partnerships like managed services to maintain successful integration over time.”
Managed services the right solution for SAP Ariba
SAP Ariba is a large technology company that provides solutions for digitalizing and integrating all or part of the source-to-pay or order-to-cash process. SAP Ariba does more than provide a connection between partners. It helps customers to holistically view their spend management to improve operational efficiencies.
The company provides its service to customers have a wide range of SAP and other back-end systems that need to integrate securely and effectively with the global network. When looking for connectivity with non-SAP systems, SAP Ariba realized that it didn’t make sense for us to develop all of that technology and maintain it in house.
SAP Ariba is at the forefront of delivering solutions for process automation and optimizing to digitally procure to pay. SAP magazine, the Digitalist, states: “One critical aspect of any business that can help companies fully deliver on their Industry 4.0 aspirations is the digital supply chain. Spanning design, manufacturing, asset management, and logistics, the digital supply chain can be deployed to play a critical role in ensuring positive customer experiences.”
Data integration based on the platform is now playing a key role in making the digital supply chain a reality. It’s delivering the reliability, availability and ease of use to remove the complexity from connections between SAP Ariba customers. The platform ensures that the service is always there to support their mission-critical supply chain activities.
The benefits of managed services
By selecting a managed service approach to data integration, SAP Ariba has been able to improve the service it offers customers while reducing the cost and complexity of integration within its network. The company is able to transfer the benefits to customers–such as greater visibility into data, faster connectivity and faster workflow management–over a highly reliable and resilient platform.
Using the OpenText™ Alloy™ platform has been so successful for SAP Ariba that the company can concentrate on providing excellent service to their customers confident that the platform is always there and working effectively. It also has the assurance to know that it has the OpenText team behind it to respond quickly when an issue does happen.
Find out more about the managed service approach to data integration at SAP Ariba. Watch the video here.
