Blog: ‘Flexible’ Data Integration All the Buzz at Gartner AADI

One of the recurring themes of Gartner’s annual Application Architecture, Development & Integration (AADI) summit this month in Las Vegas centered on flexible, agile integration platforms for the digital enterprise.

In short, a “flexible” IT solution should function to solve a variety of business use cases within an organization. This means the next generation of IT data integration solutions must have the capabilities to support current and future workflows.

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But how do you know what’s coming in the future? Well, usually you can’t know, but you really don’t have to. Many companies find that selecting a proven vendor whose software scales with their organization and with evolving business requirements positions them well into the future.

Choosing a vendor that builds its solutions on a single yet robust platform and one that continuously re-invests in its products establishes your secure managed file transfer and data integration technology as a strategic business asset, one the C-suite can leverage into new revenue streams

A few of Cleo’s customers spoke during the “Modern Integration: Big Data, Citizen Integrators, and the Next-Generation B2B Gateway” panel session during Gartner AADI, and here are some of the ways Cleo’s flexible ecosystem integration technology addresses current and future needs:

Dashboards, Protocol Flexibility, Support

This worldwide leader in manufacturing uses Cleo solutions to enable millions of internal and external transactions monthly across hundreds of trading partners. The organization:

• Says migrating to Cleo’s enterprise software gave users various dashboard capabilities that didn’t require IT to be called in. It used to be all technical people using the MFT solutions, with one team for design, delivery, and support all in the same location. But now job functions have separated and more business users are tracking transactions today.
• Enjoys the multi-protocol support from Cleo. The company uses SFTP, AS2, FTPS, and more recently Web Services, as more cloud initiatives are being implemented.
• Lauds the support Cleo provided for an in-place upgrade to its enterprise software, which took just two hours.

The future: Upcoming data integration initiatives include advanced analytics and global data warehouse for big data projects, as well as migrating regional ERP systems in cloud environments.

Our day-to-day business would stop running if Cleo went down, which has never happened, by the way.
— Senior solutions architect for integration at a global food manufacturer

Easy Partner Setup, Alerts, Cost Savings

This supply chain organization transfers 1 million files a day among 1,500 trading partners and meets SLAs day in and day out. The company:

• Uses almost every protocol out there, and Cleo’s pre-configured hosts set up new trading partners (something that occurs all the time).
• Praises Cleo for reliable, fast, lightweight, and easy-to-use solutions, and setup took less than a day.
• Says the alerts are one of Cleo’s best features. Cleo software can check file age, automate transfer checks, know when expected files haven’t shown up yet, and when they get stuck on a disk that apps are supposed to pick up.
• Moved to Cleo’s MFT solutions years ago and saved $150K a month in VAN services.

The future: Upcoming initiatives may include an upgrade to Cleo’s enterprise solutions to support high-speed file transfer and facilitate growing data applications for other lines of business.

If I’m supposed to get 10,000 files by noon, I need a tool that can tell me if I only have 8,000. And Cleo does that.
— Director of integration, global logistics and supply chain organization

Security, Centralization, Flexibility

This national insurance player manages data transfers for more than 3.5 million insured members, 5,000 employees, and 1,000 vendors, which includes massive pharmacy chains to smaller doctors’ offices). The organization:

• Required security, centralization, and flexibility to connect with different vendors:
  • Security to maintain standards and stay up to date with evolving needs.
  • Centralization to bring internal/external users into one application and provide easy reporting and auditing features.
  • Flexibility to cater to large technical vendors with their own data centers and also to the non-technical nurse sending info from a rural doctor’s office.
• Praises Cleo’s support teams for fast response and guide help with troubleshooting.
• Loves the reporting tools. When the insurer first started initiating transfers, IT got tons of “Did this file get transferred?” emails. But Cleo-enabled visibility helps limit those inquiries, freeing up IT for more mission-critical initiatives and giving business users what they need to perform routine tasks.

The future: Upcoming projects will look at accommodating larger data transfers using the Cleo Jetsonic high-speed transfer protocol, enabling easy transmission and automatic restart for files that top 150 GBs. The insurer also will be implementing new protocols, including AS3.

Cleo support has been meeting the requirements and needs of our customers.
— IT infrastructure analyst, national healthcare insurer

More on Flexible, Next-Generation Integration

You can read more about the next-generation B2B functionality these companies are implementing and how the Cleo Integration Cloud helps deliver those capabilities.

Cleo also wants to say thanks to everyone who attended and stopped by our booth at this year’s Gartner AADI event. We had a great turnout and a lot of interesting conversations that have us excited to further provide cutting-edge solutions to solve real-world business integration challenges.