When we started providing managed integration services we knew our customers would get value by eliminating this resource-intensive and costly effort from their IT operations. The concept was that valuable time and money could be better spent – somehow. We’ve taken a step back to see whether the vision has played out: what do our customers actually spend their “found time” on? A few themes emerged.

1. They go broad. This one seems obvious – but it’s actually true. Customers who don’t need to constantly track and monitor transactions can work to add more document types to existing trading partner relationships, extending electronic transactions farther into the supply chain.
2. They go deep. Our customers report significant increases in the number and scope of trading partners: integration’s not just for the Top 3 anymore.
3. They try something new. To a few of our customers, eliminating day-to-day management of transaction flow and map adjustments meant that they could take a look at more innovative ways to meet their business goals. They work on more innovative projects that add value to the business. Here’s one example of an innovative customer.
4. They reap the rewards of a more satisfied team. When IT staffers shed repetitive tasks in favor of innovative, strategic, exciting projects they can see why their work matters.
5. They reallocate. The cost savings had to go somewhere, right? Our customers kept this information close to their vests, but we’re sure the money saved with managed services came in handy.

It’s not every day that you find a technology blog entry without acronyms, but that’s my goal for this one. It should be easy because it’s not about systems or protocols or platforms, it concerns Liaison’s recent growth and how we see our responsibility to our stakeholders.

Liaison has experienced tremendous growth during the last few years, both by acquisition and organically. With this growth came a need to increase our mapping and technical support teams, so we started evaluating our alternatives. You may have noticed that at Liaison we don’t shy away from new ideas – in fact, we tend to pursue them. After an extensive evaluation we decided to “onshore” about 15 Liaison Technical jobs at the Small Business Incubator on the campus of Southern Illinois University Carbondale. These are full-time positions filled by employees with strong technical degrees and backgrounds.

Our experience tells us that for every employee we hire in the US we’d need to hire 1.5 in India or China. We also know that international outsourcing ultimately costs us efficiency with language and cultural barriers, meeting regulatory requirements, dealing with political uncertainty, and even managing time zone differences. We decided to pursue “rural sourcing” with the idea that the lower cost of living in these rural areas would allow us to maintain relatively low costs, give us access to excellent information technology talent, and keep jobs in the US.

We have already hired 10 new employees at our Carbondale office; two thirds are recent graduates and the remaining third are seasoned technology resources. We expect to increase this to 25 in 2012. We think this is a win for Liaison, for our customers, and our investors and we’re proud to lead the way in rural outsourcing in our industry. 

By the way, for those interested in a bit of college mascot trivia: can you tell me what a Saluki is?

Watching the FIFA World Cup has me wondering what it sounds like out on the field and how the players and refs communicate. Body language is fairly universal, and at the end of the game talk doesn’t matter, but I’m certain there must be a need for some on-field translation at some point, and I can’t figure out how it’s done. Brazil plays Ivory Coast, Slovakia plays Paraguay, and the refs could be from just about anywhere. These sorts of matchups must stretch some linguistic limits.

It almost makes data translation seem simple, and as many Liaison customers know, it’s not at all simple. Our customers capture, manage, organize and leverage all of the integration metadata in their enterprise (no small task), associate that metadata with a semantic “dictionary”, and establish an integration vocabulary and thesaurus. Contivo is one solution that automates data transformation and reconciliation tasks. Our customers get the benefit of quickly and easy creating connections between disparate systems that would otherwise not speak the same ‘data language’. Simple, right?

If you’re interested, the Associated Press does have a decent guess about how the refs know when to throw a yellow card when the players curse in another language.

At Liaison we’ve been helping pharmaceutical industry clients integrate for a long time, and we’ve done this in the usual way: middleware adapters, document maps, any-to-any translations. For several years we’ve anticipated a major shift for these firms – away from on-premise and proprietary technology to open, collaborative, and yes, cloud-based solutions – and we’re seeing this prediction come true.

As with all logical, inevitable, and ultimately successful technical advances, in pharma’s case the gathering momentum for cloud-based integration is driven by the business and regulatory mandates in the industry. Collaboration is key in the modern pharma and biotech world – patent expiries and the distribution of research and innovation across multiple entities (academic, service providers, and manufacturers among them) ensure that.

This collaboration isn’t theoretical – and it’s not symbolic. It’s happening today, and it requires integration. Life Sciences firms have a clear and present need for rapid implementation of data integration, data transformation, and partner enablement; cloud-based integration can meet these demands.

Over decades, Pharmas have advanced the art and science of research and development and innovation. It seems appropriate that this core competency would eventually appear in the industry’s IT departments. Our pharma clients won’t be the last to fully embrace integration in the cloud, but they just might be the first.

Unless you live under a rock somewhere you’ve heard some hype about SaaS and cloud services as alternative deployment models for accessing technology. Certain business processes and applications have experienced early adoption by users; this seems to happen where processes can be clearly defined and where data dependencies are very low. On the other hand, some applications just aren’t ready for this type of deployment. Or are they?

In some industries there’s a lot of effort to explicitly share master data with as many people as possible. I just returned from Gartner’s MDM Summit and it was clear that many companies are focused on doing just that. Product catalogs are a common example of data everyone wants to share. But other master data (like customer, vendor, and employee data) applications are examples of segments that are under-clouded today. Many of the companies we talk to DON’T want to move more sensitive data (like customer data) outside the firewall to be managed, but in real life they do DO share it outside their firewall, daily – with suppliers, customers, and partners – in their integrated B2B transaction interactions.

So, is master data management the exception to the emergence of outsourced/SaaS/cloud delivery? There are several hosted MDM offerings (single/isolated tenant SaaS) and hosted data services (remote data cleaning services) that operate outside the firewall, so there appears to already be a very small part of the MDM market that exists in the cloud. The idea of moving more master data outside, and even moving governance and authorship to a SaaS- or cloud-based deployment, doesn’t appear that far removed for some MDM environments. So why does MDM seem to have its feet planted firmly behind the firewall?

When was the last time a colleague said “You’ve got to see this!” about an enterprise application? In consumer-facing applications it happens all the time – Google- and Facebook-like companies produce the best UI innovations that quickly become standard practice.

An example: faceted search. Pioneered by popular consumer facing product-related web sites, faceted search allows users to find items based on several different attributes. User can navigate in the data and drill down to results (for a great example, search for a digital camera on cnet). While getting to the results faster, the user also learns interesting breakdowns and projections of the data along different dimensions. Users love faceted search because it’s faster and more intuitive – and yes, this applies to business users and consumers alike. More and more enterprise applications, guided by consumer applications, now use faceted search – and this includes Liaison; we use it in LENS, our business activity monitoring tool.

Does it have to be this way? Why can’t enterprise apps lead the way in user experience excellence? After all, aren’t those same Yahoo, eBay, Amazon and Facebook users the very same people who run enterprise applications? It’s long overdue: we need to catch up to – and exceed – consumer apps in usability. Business users expect it, and they should.

Welcome to the Liaison blog. In our ten-plus years of experience in the trenches of integration and data management we’ve learned a few valuable lessons and enjoy a unique perspective; we get to see the trends that shape our portion of the technology world up-close, every day. We’ve worked hard to develop and hone our point of view, and we look forward to sharing our thoughts with you in this space.

In 2010, most of the integration professionals we consult with see their EAI/ESB Software purchases in their rearview mirror. Their software vendor’s upgrade story (code name: BPM) is only moderately compelling, now their real question is “Where does enterprise integration go from here?”

We predict that over the next several years all five Kübler-Ross stages of grief will play out, clearing the way for real enterprise integration change. We think the stages of EAI/ESB grief will sound like this: 

Denial  “Look at these numbers! My per-unit costs for internal integration projects have gone down 20% from what they were before we created our Integration Center of Excellence, Enterprise Application Platform and off-shore delivery team.”

 Anger  “What are we spending to maintain, support and upgrade our four EAI environments? That can’t be right! This was supposed to get cheaper once we reached steady-state!”

Bargaining  “We got a great deal on our EAI software and BPM modules, we just have to use it more. After all it is not just an Enterprise Service Bus, it’s a BPM Platform.”

Depression  “You’re kidding me. The EAI software we RFPed, negotiated through our procurement CoE and rolled out was actually the smallest component of our spending on enterprise integration.”

Acceptance  “Per-unit cost reductions and relative referencing that we used to justify our ongoing EAI/ESB investments simply have to be replaced by absolute measures compared to the next best alternative.”

We think the first four stages can be bypassed with LeanEAI, and so do some of our forward-thinking customers. You can hear from one of these customers at our webinar ‘Lean EAI – Making the Case for Integration in the Cloud.’