We attend and sponsor a variety of industry and solutions provider events throughout the year that deal with business and data integration. REMEDI has participated in two such events in the last several weeks. I am amazed by the differences in some of these events, and drivers of those that organize them, and here are some of my observations.
The world is more connected, complex, regulated, and global than ever. Business systems and the integration tools that connect them internally, and with external partners, need to keep pace. My observations are that there are some who are rising to this challenge and others not as interested.
In the not so interested category, are those solution providers that have a single purpose solution where there is little incremental innovation and the provider's main revenue stream is maintenance and subscription fees. Others have a variety of related, un-integrated solutions, with no intent of connecting them on their product road map. And there are some solution providers betting on solutions with particular delivery methods while planning to let others languish.
As a third party integration solutions provider, REMEDI is embraced by solutions developers in different manners, depending on their preferred route to market. And at times, we are invited to participate in customer facing events. In the partner spectrum, some will have nothing to do with third party organizations as they have no desire for anything but a direct channel to the customer. Others view organizations like ours as a referral partner, yet competitor, for implementation services. There are also some that prefer to use deployment partners just to deploy solutions sold directly. Lastly, there are solutions providers that have comprehensive partner programs where partners resell, deploy, and train the client, who was discovered as a partner identified lead, or a passed lead, by the solution developers' sales organization.
IBM falls into the last category described above and the Smarter Commerce Global Summit 2014 in Tampa was our most recent and impactful event. Smarter Commerce is a concept highly marketed by IBM, but is actually a collection of solutions divided into 4 subcategories...Buy, Market, Sell, and Service. And this is a portfolio that continues to be expanded, as outlined in our blog MFT Filling the GAP in Your Software Portfolio.
REMEDIs Breaking Ground In New Markets Award from IBM and the Aspera (IBM) Emmy Engenieering Award for Rapid/Large File Transfer
Within the Smarter Commerce portfolio, REMEDI focuses on solutions sales, deployment services, and consulting services in the Integration, Managed File Transfer, and Commerce categories. From our role as a Premier Partner, and the access we have to product management and product development, I can assure you IBM is focused on innovation with the products in the portfolio and also focused on cross product integration (current/future) where such integration makes sense. This was also evident at road map sessions presented at the conference.
I contrast this commitment against some other integration solution providers, who have placed all their bets on SaaS as an integration solution delivery methodology, or those milking maintenance revenue out of old EDI/file transfer products with little to no innovation, whose customers have recently abandoned these solutions in favor of IBM Integration, Managed File Transfer, and Commerce solutions deployed by REMEDI.
Interesting the differences one can experience between one conference and another...or even be permitted to attend for that matter :-)
