B2B Data Integration and Transformation Blog

Key Takeaways:

• Growth is limited in businesses that view EDI as a cost center.
• Businesses that embrace modern EDI have a competitive advantage.
• The strategic benefits of EDI have a measurable return on investment.

When you think about hosted EDI, the first thing that comes to mind is the “where.” Where will the EDI solution be hosted? Typically, the debate has been cloud vs. on-premises EDI.

Twenty years ago, no one could imagine that it would be possible to access information from anywhere. The status quo was that you were tied to your desk, and if you needed to check something like an order status, you either had to be at your desk or call someone who was at his or her desk. That is not the case anymore; the cloud enables you to work on the go, any time you want.

The retail industry has transformed tremendously in the past few decades; back in the 1980s, it would have been unthinkable to order merchandise from your computer. Yet today, buyers do it from our mobile phones all the time.

Over the past few years, we have quickly seen cloud storage become a huge part of our personal and professional lives. For those unfamiliar with cloud storage, it’s essentially an intangible hard drive that allows storage and access to data for a variety of users. Cloud storage grants many benefits to daily tasks, mobile devices, and web services we all use. Whether we know it or not, we’re using a cloud when collaborating online with co-workers, using email, and even streaming entertainment at home. Such profound innovations seem to find their way into almost all aspects of our lives in time, so I was surprised to read in this article, by Scott Koegler, that only 8% of billing transactions are cloud based.