The legal side of integration

Very interesting news in the press the last couple of days. The Salesforce system of the beverages company Diageo allows a large group of users to access data in back-end systems, including SAP ERP. Because of the named user license model of SAP, British court has ruled that a fee must be paid for each user of the Salesforce system. A little known aspect of integration: legal! Actually, the integration between Salesforce and the on-premise SAP and Oracle systems was handled by SAP PI.

Interview by AdeptEvents

Regularly I give public workshops on the topic of Application Integration in Belgium via SAI and in the Netherlands via AdeptEvents. A video interview about my workshop and the topic of application integration has just been released by AdeptEvents. Enjoy!

IBM Watson Customer Engagement

A few weeks ago, attended a big IBM training event about IBM's e-commerce offering. During the conference, a new brand name was released: "Watson Customer Engagement". My primary interest were the B2B integration solution of IBM, that are part of this suite and fall under the category "Watson Supply Chain".

IBM has an extensive range of products that are part of it's Watson Customer Engagement offering: obviously e-commerce or "Digital Commerce", but also Order Mangement, procurement, digital marketing, customer experience analytics and much more. There is even a specific product to have an overview of all available stock across all warehouses and stores.

My focus was rather on IBM's offerings for B2B integration and Managed File Transfer (MFT). Sterling B2B Integrator is the core product on which the Sterling File Gateway builds further to provide a user-friendly Managed File Transfer solution.

Maybe not well known, but IBM also has a very extensive B2B integration network called the IBM B2B Collaboration Network.

Everyone of the IntegrationDesigners team (IBM integration team of the Cronos group) gets his turn to attend events and conferences. Already had the IBM cloud conference in Madrid in October 2016 and now this conference in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Trip to Las Vegas was quite a hell: snow on the road to Brussels airport, more than an hour wait in the plane before take-off in Brussels, very late arrival in New York because of snow, missed connecting flight, long queue to re-book to another flight, just-in-time to get on the last plane to Las Vegas, long wait in the plane to be de-iced, ... Such 28 hour trip is pretty tiring.

By: Guy