The Benefits of Integrating via a B2B Cloud
The concept of Cloud Computing is well understood, but less so in a B2B environment, especially in a B2B and SAP context where there is a significant potential cost saving opportunity for many companies. Cloud Computing in a B2B environment offers the means to provision a constantly up-to-date B2B infrastructure at a fraction of the cost that an individual organisation could do themselves. It offers the potential of a range of value-added services that can drive efficiency through all aspects of your B2B and SAP operations.
B2B Managed Services providers utilise a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to quickly and cost-effectively create innovative B2B applications that they can ‘rent’ on-demand to organisations who are looking to maximise connectivity with their trading partner community.
Key benefits of using a B2B Cloud include:
- No development or maintenance of a B2B infrastructure
- The B2B infrastructure is always based on the latest standards and technologies
- No need for direct point-to-point connection with your trading partners
- Trading partner profiles are maintained externally
- Performance and support is backed by solid SLAs
- No software license costs
- Only pay for what you use
- Scalable capacity as required
By using a B2B Cloud, you take advantage of SOA for B2B application development based around shared and reusable components. Services can range from identity, context and accounting to document translation, protocol mediation and data quality. These are all based on common content repositories, which contain trading partner profiles and configurable business rules. Importantly, these services are held externally to your SAP system ensuring the highest level of data quality and maintaining your trading partner relationships without point-to-point connection.
Components can be quickly and easily updated to reflect any required change without affecting your B2B infrastructure performance or your SAP system.
40% of the world’s B2B data traffic already passes through a B2B Cloud – GXS Trading Grid
GXS Trading Grid is an example of a specialised B2B cloud. The Trading Grid platform supports hundreds of open standards ranging from communications protocols to messaging standards and business processes. On top of this foundation are a series of SOA business service APIs that make it easier to build and operate B2B systems. Most B2B integration today is done with these tools and services. The result is a reliable and secure B2B infrastructure with the flexibility and scalability to respond quickly to your business challenges – with you only paying for the services that you actually consume.
GXS Trading Grid: the B2B Cloud from GXS
GXS has invested more than £400 million to create a high performance, highly secure B2B Cloud computing platform, that includes:
- Modular blade servers, storage area networks, and a high capacity, intra-data center WAN
- Fully redundant data storage and operations between GXS data centres
- 99.95% service availability
- Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based application provision
- A comprehensive range of Software as a Service (SaaS) applications covering areas such as product and price management, supply chain visibility, and invoices and payments
- 24/7, multi-lingual support coverage
- Fully SAP NetWeaver certified
Find out more about the cloud computing capabilities of GXS.
Why use B2B Managed Services?
B2B Managed Services, also called B2B Outsourcing, can be defined as outsourcing the provision of your B2B infrastructure to a third party provider, such as GXS. With the increasing cost and complexity of simply maintaining B2B systems internally, over 60% of companies already outsource some part of their B2B infrastructure according to research from Yankee Group.
When integrating B2B requirements with your SAP systems, B2B Managed Services delivers a wide range of benefits:
Ensure Data Quality: With AMR Research proving that almost every SAP system has accepted bad data from external sources, it is clear that the best solution is to clean the data prior to it entering your SAP implementation – so the data has no opportunity to infect other business systems. B2B Managed Services allows you to create an ERP Firewall around your SAP system. Based on established SAP business rules, this simple approach is a major move to eliminating unclean data and, as your Managed Services provider will be constantly refining the firewall, the solution becomes more effective over time.
Forget B2B Complexity: How easily can you integrate current B2B standards, technologies and communications protocols into your internal systems? Then factor in the knowledge that these standards, technologies and protocols are changing and evolving constantly. Now, consider an increasingly global marketplace that is still driven by local trading standards and regulations. How easy is it to enter a new geographical market or trade with new suppliers in Eastern Europe or the Far East? B2B Managed Services shields you completely from this level of complexity. All you need to be confident about is that your Managed Services provider has fully invested to seamlessly support all the standards, technologies and protocols to enable you to begin trading in whichever geographical locations you wish almost immediately.
Accelerate Trading Partner Onboarding: Many organisations report that trading partner on-boarding can add significant delay to meeting their business objectives. B2B Managed Services mean that you can on-board trading quickly and effectively as you are both plugging into a common B2B infrastructure where technology, regulatory and performance issues have already been overcome. You can begin to create a secure ‘plug and play’ trading community.
Increase Business Agility: Responding to changes within your trading community will be key to driving value in your business. However, you can’t afford to continually upgrade your B2B infrastructure or rewrite elements of your SAP systems to accommodate them. B2B Managed Services are often delivered via a B2B Cloud that uses a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to produce a component-based approach to delivering B2B services. The result is that individual components can be quickly updated to absorb all changes without affecting the performance or operations of the provider’s B2B infrastructure and – as importantly – completely outside your SAP implementation and without any intervention from you.
On-demand and Scalable: One of the great advantages of B2B Managed Services is that you are not charged for capacity that you are not using and you have the ability to scale up and down seamlessly as business demand dictates. Most B2B outsourcing contracts are charged on a transactional basis. Sometimes you will be able to pay an initial subscription fee that allows you to reduce the downstream ‘per transaction’ fees. The cost benefits of B2B Managed Services become apparent. You can eliminate the need for initial B2B infrastructure development as well as the need to pay for and support capacity that you don’t require.
Program Management and Support: SAP to B2B integration requires an immense amount of coordination across your extended enterprise. If you use your program to extend the functionality of your SAP systems then this must be carefully managed so that the correct changes are introduced into your B2B solutions. But, implementation is only the beginning. Change management and global support begin to be important factors as soon as the initial system is delivered. B2B Managed Services can provide a flexible and scalable B2B resource so as your project grows your resource can grow accordingly. However, this requires a large-scale B2B Managed Service provider as you should expect the provider to understand the legal and regulatory landscape for any give region or nation as well as delivering local language support.
If you would like to learn more about B2B Managed Services and how it can help your company then please visit our dedicated microsite: www.b2boutsourcing.co.uk