Three Things You Need To Know About EDI/EAI & Middleware Costs!

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Software Licensing Costs Will Continue To Grow

Companies large and small spend a significant portion of their IT operational budgets on renewing the various software licenses. Additionally, capital budget investments are spent on infrastructure upgrades every 3-5 years, which force further spend on new licenses with the new platforms. These costs continue to compound when additional resources are added to the team or external consultants to do the work or up-train existing EDI staff to keep up with these upgrades. All this is done while ensuring business continuity and making sure their departments/teams are addressing business needs to contribute to company growth.

SaaS (Cloud) Providers May Have Proprietary Integration Needs (And Ongoing Costs)

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) based systems make sense initially, with quick implementation promises. However, SaaS potentially comes with proprietary integration methods which necessitate ongoing subscription costs and may make migrations or non-standard integration very painful in the future. Therefore, SaaS is not a preferred approach for most long-term EDI/EAI integration roadmaps.

Custom EDI/EAI Implementations Can Be More Efficient

The EDI/EAI and Middleware Stack solve essential business functions, such as:

  • Connect trading partners (protocols)

  • Analyze & Route data

  • Map services (transformations)

  • Mine data

  • Implement business logic and rules (BPM)

  • Report errors and exceptions

  • Provide visibility into business operations

  • Onboard new customers and vendors (B2B)

  • Connect one or many applications to each other (A2A)

  • Support batch or scheduled functions

By implementing a custom EDI/EAI integration with industry-focused platforms, the implementation can support your specific business needs. Additionally, the implementation team will support the specific integrations that your business needs while simultaneously minimizing the number of software licenses needed and not requiring ongoing subscription costs.

The ongoing work of implementing or maintaining EDI/EAI & Middleware platforms; keeping the systems up-to-date; on-boarding new partners; taking care of business needs while keeping business users happy; supporting all the cutting-edge toolsets out there; and keeping internal staff up-trained and motivated can all feel like trying to change a tire on the car while driving down the road.

Or maybe, it can be more appropriately described by one line from Scotty in Star Trek Into Darkness
“The notion of transwarp beaming is like trying to hit a bullet with a smaller bullet, whilst wearing a blindfold, riding a horse”.

EDI/EAI can appear to be overwhelming, but Aidant Technologies can help you streamline and simplify your integrations both operationally and financially. You can be in control of the costs and functionality. We will show you how we achieve end-to-end functionality with flexibility and lower ongoing licensing and migrations costs. We use Microsoft tools and technology to support EDI and all data integration needs through our ready to implement data integration platform.