B2B Data Integration and Transformation Blog

I am a fan of the History Channel and one of my guilty pleasures is watching Swamp People.  It is crazy to me how people want to hunt Alligators, an animal that can live up to a hundred years and grow to 13-15 feet long or longer.  If you have never watched the show, the hunters put bait on a line to catch them and then they have to fight with them to get to a quarter sized kill shot and haul them in the boat.  Most people struggle and fight with the 600 pound monsters until they can get to the kill spot.  I saw a different approach on a recent episode.  Liz and her daughter (the only female hunters on the show),  started off pulling and tugging the line like every other time but this time the alligator was wrapped around the tree like dogs do with their leashes.  The line was very close to snapping and they would have lost the prized alligator and $650.  Liz decided she had to try a different approach and gave the alligator a whole lot of slack and waited for him to calm down.  This surprised and confused the alligator and he decided to come up out of the water to look and see what happened out of curiosity.  As soon as he surfaced, the fight was over.

You are probably wondering what this has to do with EDI……..

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.  

At the beginning of the year my family decided to sponsor our first child from Honduras.  The country is bordered by Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua.  Honduras is home to several important cultures and their population exceeds eight million.  They are most notable for their production of minerals, coffee, tropical fruit, etc…

Congratulations to Remedi on winning the Breaking Ground in New Markets award at Smarter Commerce 2014!

In business integration and data integration there is much talk about the "business network".  And if you have been around EDI and EAI for 20 years or so like Remedi, I'm sure you've noticed some changes.  While there are certainly advancements in IT disciplines and tools, some things stay the same or seem to be re-named to modernize the terms.  For example, business network is the new trading partner base, B2Bi is the new EDI, and data integration is the new EAI and ETL.  

Given some of the things that have been a constant or re-named in the IT discipline of business and data integration, what exactly has changed?