Poor Integration Costs Businesses Half a M************** Every Year, According to 2019 Market Report

Lost Orders, Inaccurate Data, and Cumbersome Onboarding Processes Driving More Than Half of Organizations to Modernize Integration

Businesses in every industry face B2B, application, and cloud integration challenges that jeopardize revenue opportunities and threaten growth, and more than half of organizations report that those challenges take a $500,000 toll on the business every year.

How much is poor #integration costing your business? A 2019 market report says that toll could be up to $500K a year!

Cleo, the global leader in cloud and ecosystem integration technology, recently surveyed 100 IT decision-makers across industries to gauge the state of their integration and digital communication capabilities. The surveyed companies spanned the supply chain, financial services, retail/e-commerce, healthcare, and technology sectors, and nearly 70 percent reported annual revenues between $100 million and $1 billion. The results, which have been compiled in the 2019 State of Ecosystem and Application Integration Report, indicate a costly gap in the strategies and solutions required to support the modern business.

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While nearly all the survey respondents are aware of the critical role initiatives like IT modernization, system consolidation, and end-to-end visibility play in their ability to compete and drive revenue, they also understand the realities of their current IT infrastructures and processes, and how challenging it is just to keep up – let alone get ahead.

“The overwhelming consensus from these IT decision-makers is that new business demands – many of them brought by forces outside the company – are putting additional pressure on organizations and technologies to deliver better ecosystem integration solutions,” said Cleo CMO Tushar Patel. “And when they can’t, it’s costing the business money. But for many of these organizations, it’s not an immediately solvable problem because they don’t have the strategy, the tools, the budget, or the resources to execute on these revenue-impacted initiatives.”

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Those initiatives, according to the survey, centered on faster time to revenue with new business partners, optimized B2B processes, and enhanced business transparency. The most reported challenges with the respondents’ B2B solutions and processes were the inability to:

• Integrate with new applications, especially SaaS applications
• Quickly onboard new customers and partners
• Automate critical transactions powering the ecosystem
• Gain visibility into end-to-end data flows

The escalating costs directly related to these challenges are significant: Poor integrations and lack of resources contribute to hundreds of lost orders each year, leading to annual revenue losses in the range of $250,000 to $500,000 for 57 percent of those surveyed and upward of $1,000,000 for others.

“The fact that the majority of businesses face revenue losses of at least $250,000 each year is a startling statistic, and it’s a major pain point for the IT decision-makers polled,” Patel said. “The good news is that most IT teams believe they can positively influence company value if they can find better ways to support end-to-end transactions with their ecosystem, which is precisely what Cleo’s ecosystem integration platform promises to help them do.”

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Often the first step in finding the right solution is fully understanding the business problems, which many of the survey respondents had little trouble identifying:

• 95 percent of surveyed companies strive to enable their business ecosystems, but 38 percent lack confidence in their capacity to scale to support the integration initiatives foundational to doing so.
• 63 percent of IT decision-makers say new business onboarding is too complex and takes too long.
• 29 percent report lacking the skilled resources to build and manage integrations between systems, applications, and partner ecosystems.
• 22 percent say legacy technologies cause significant delays in generating new revenue, and 81 percent believe replacing legacy systems will support emerging business initiatives.

Overall, the decision-makers surveyed said modernization is key to consolidating disparate technologies, automating data transaction processes, and gaining visibility into their critical data flows, and it is the reason why more than half plan to modernize their integration and IT infrastructure in 2019.

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“It’s often easier for companies to rely on homegrown or outdated B2B systems and inward-focused legacy solutions to drive their businesses, but it’s ill-advised to push off IT modernization for too long, especially as the app explosion continues to permeate the enterprise,” Patel added. “We’ve seen tremendous success for companies supporting these emerging requirements with a single ecosystem integration platform as the nexus of their application, cloud, and trading partner interactions.”

But such modernization efforts start with the strategic alignment of business units and IT teams working toward the goal of long-term success. That alignment, according to Cleo, will manifest as a modernized digital ecosystem that eliminates the end-to-end data flow interruptions costing organizations hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue every year.

“When business growth depends on the agility to meet changing ecosystem dynamics, you must ensure you can easily manage new partner requests while maximizing the value of your existing and new best-of-breed applications,” Patel emphasized. “Cleo’s ecosystem-driven approach – viewing business processes from the outside-in, performing B2B and application integration on a single platform through a blend of self-service and managed services, evaluating the organization in context of its expanded trading partner network, and striving to empower those relationships – solves the challenges plaguing these IT decision-makers and costing their businesses money.”

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