EDI: Mature Technology. Why Is It Still Hard & Expensive?
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Electronic Data Interchange (EDI).
It’s been around since the 70’s, matured through the 80’s with standard bodies developed for X12, EDIFACT, etc, was declared “dead” in the 90’s - yet still continues to grow in ever-increasing incarnations and volume to this day with no end in sight. Why? The promise and delivery of VALUE to the business. The concept of “frictionless” trade between companies is Nirvana, and though in theory would be perfect, much like a perfect vacuum, will never be completely achieved.
Since we know there will always be some friction, let’s discuss this from two perspectives internal to organizations: Financial/Business and Technical.
First is the Financial/Business view.
CEOs, CFOs and others with fiduciary responsibilities are driven to maximize revenue and decrease costs to deliver the financial performance on which their jobs depend. To do so, they need timely data and usable tools to access the data, to help them make sound financial decisions. Okay, that’s a given.
Most recently these business needs have given rise to new technologies to deliver information with Big Data Analytics, IIOT, and an ever-evolving landscape that is frankly dizzying to these fiduciary stakeholders. They care about the “what”, not the “how” - unless those solutions affect their performance measures (cost too much and/or take too long to achieve the business value).
So, this takes us to the second perspective, the Technical view. Businesses trust their technology teams to evaluate, choose, and utilize technology to help them achieve their business objectives. All know that the technology landscape (or battlefield) is exploding with ever-new and promising solutions. It is also littered with a lot of their graves, and frankly, even a lot of careers. It is indeed an exciting and dangerous landscape.
There are many “heroes” out there too, and many more are needed. Security, AI/Machine learning, Photonics, Blockchain, and many others come to mind. Thank goodness bright minds across the globe are pushing our capabilities on so many of these fronts!
BUSINESS VALUE (positive or negative) occurs at the intersection of these two perspectives, which leads us back to our question: “If EDI is a mature technology, why is it still so hard and expensive?”
Common answers abound, summarized as something like, “It’s the best we’re ever going to get without throwing a lot more money at it. We’ve been on this road a long time and have reached the point of diminishing returns. Yes, it is a pain point we, of course, would like to solve - but all our experts agree the time and cost to fix it is not worth the trade-offs. Our resources are better spent elsewhere on our core business.” In the end, it’s a resignation to accepting lower business value.
Why haven’t traditional integration companies solved it? Because vendors focus on maximizing their OWN valuations first, rather than their customers’ through high software licensing and consultancy costs, transactional pricing models that are often exponentially expensive once a customer is “locked in,” and complicated deployments that make it very hard to change.
So is there a better way? YES!!!
The new “David” on the battlefield of “Goliaths”, brings a revolutionary approach that is really quite simple: DI. Platform. A lightweight. NET-based software stack on minimal x86 infrastructure that can handle very small to massive workloads. Deployable on-premise, in the cloud, or in a hybrid model. It provides a real-time view of all B2B traffic in a role-based dashboard for business and technical users, that is non-disruptive to current processes and priced is at a fraction of traditional and even new “solutions”.
Sound too good to be true? The proof is in the pudding, as they say. A very quick analysis will provide the proof and leave evaluators asking, “Why hasn’t anyone done this before?” We wonder the same…
Contact us to learn more.
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