Written by
Saad Merchant
Published on
October 25, 2022
Most experts on digital transformation will tell you that it involves much more than simply integrating the latest digital technologies with your business processes. However, whatever new digital technology that a business implements is ultimately accessed through a software solution or cloud app. Getting digital technologies to sync and combine their services via these software (and their respective APIs) is significantly easier. The Alumio iPaaS (integration Platform as a Service) is a next-gen solution that facilitates digital transformation efforts by enabling businesses to integrate any two or multiple software, systems, or data sources on one platform, with seamless data sharing.
“The worldwide market for digital transformation is expected to surge from $521.5 billion (in 2021) to a staggering $1,247.5 billion (in 2026).”
While a business can embark on its digital transformation journey for many reasons, it is most commonly fueled by a survival instinct. To understand why, we needn’t look further than the recent Covid-19 pandemic and how it affected businesses worldwide, especially the ones that weren’t digitally able. In the aftermath of the pandemic, the ability of a business to adjust to supply chain disruptions, time-to-market pressures, and rapidly transforming customer expectations has come under the lens.
Yet, survivability factors aside, the kickstart to any digital transformation effort aims to improve business processes, enhance customer experience, ease business friction, push productivity limits, and boost profitability. Today, there’s a software solution or app to digitalize nearly every department or work process of a business, from Marketing, Sales, HR, Logistics, Customer Service, you name it! The most popular software solutions (SaaS) or cloud apps that businesses integrate to digitalize these operations are e-commerce platforms, ERP, PIM, CRM, WMS, POS, channel marketing, and many such systems.
86% of companies believe cloud technology is critical to digital transformation.
However, Implementing multiple new technologies in an organization is now a minor part of the plot; getting them to all work together and seamlessly share data is a major part of the digital transformation story. To accomplish this, modern businesses are implementing next-gen solutions like the Alumio iPaaS (integration Platform as a Service) to holistically create integrations for digital transformation.
“At least 40% of all businesses will die in the next 10 years… if they don’t figure out how to change their entire company to accommodate new technologies.” — John Chambers, Cisco
The Alumio iPaaS (integration Platform as a Service) is a next-gen connectivity solution. It enables businesses to quickly and cost-effectively integrate two or multiple software, apps, or data sources, across on-premise and cloud environments.
It is a cloud-based, low-code platform that both developers and non-developers (project managers, data experts, C-Level) can collaborate on to create, manage, and monitor integrations on one user-friendly interface. Most importantly, it provides organizations with a centralized, dedicated cloud environment for all their integrations, giving them a clear overview of their IT ecosystem through one intuitive dashboard.
Forbes recently showcased a study conducted by the Boston Consulting Group, which found that 70% of digital transformation projects fail to achieve their goals despite a green light from leadership. One of the key reasons can be attributed to complex integration and scalability metrics. To reiterate, digital transformation isn't just about integrating multiple new technologies; it's about integrating it all within one IT ecosystem. The Alumio iPaas helps centralize all integrated software and systems on one scalable, dedicated cloud space with seamless data sharing.
To learn more about achieving sustainable digital transformation, read our white paper on how the Alumio iPaaS helps businesses create future-proof IT ecosystems.
However, before we speed into the future of integrations with the Alumio iPaaS - let’s backtrack to explore the benefits of digital transformation. Why do organizations really need it, and why is it such a big deal?
Reports show that 54% of transformation efforts are modernizing customer touchpoints through digital transformation.
As indicated before, digital transformation plays a crucial role in customer experience, operational agility, culture, leadership, workforce enablement, and software solution (SaaS) or cloud app integration. In this regard, some key business benefits of pursuing digital transformation are:
Integrating software solutions or applications for digital growth isn’t just about remotely automating repetitive manual tasks. Instead, apart from freeing employees for higher-value work, one of the significant advantages of these digital solutions is that they provide valuable, real-time data insights for improvement.
For instance, using an integration platform like the Alumio iPaaS to integrate a WMS (Warehouse Management System) with your business means automating inventory tracking, predicting product availability, shipping calculations, and delivery dates. Using the iPaaS to integrate such a WMS solution with an ERP or an e-commerce platform can help significantly improve real-time inventory management and forecasting product availability.
One of the key advantages of digital transformation is that it entails implementing software solutions like the Alumio iPaaS (integration Platform as a Service), which gathers customer data from all business touchpoints through software integrations. The iPaaS provides a visual analysis of the data that can be effectively used to improve customer experiences and discover new opportunities and areas for improvement.
By enabling businesses to integrate all their systems, software, and data sources on one platform, the Alumio iPaaS enables seamless data sharing and 360-degree data insights. It helps unlock data silos and organize all disparate data stored across departments into data lakes. This holistic control of integrated data that the Alumio iPaaS provides can be used to optimize the targeting of marketing activities, ad spends, and budgets for business improvements. The platform can also be used to make digitally transforming companies ready for Business Intelligence, AI, and ML technology, which are systems that thrive on holistic data collection.
One of the core reasons for digital transformation is the rapidly evolving standards for customer experience. The expectations and demands of customers for digital and real-time services are increasing by the day. They progressively expect immediate results and simplified processes. CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is where digital transformation has seen critical developments in the past decade, from highly advanced chatbots to full-fledged CRM cloud applications.
By enabling enterprises to integrate their connected systems to any CRM solution quickly, the Alumio iPaaS helps make customer service touchpoints available anywhere, anytime, and from any device. CRM systems provide valuable data insights on customers, trends, or troublesome areas that can turn into opportunities. It enables businesses to generate targeted marketing campaigns and effective sales follow-ups. By building customer profiles, past purchase logs, and interaction history, a CRM system significantly boosts the efficiency with which businesses deal with customer queries or problems. It also helps automate reminders on abandoned checkouts and informative email sequences to customer inquiries.
According to BusinessWire, it was predicted that companies would spend a mind-boggling $641 billion on customer experience in 2022.
The Alumio iPaaS doesn’t just help enterprises integrate aforementioned systems and software for digital growth, but it also facilitates transforming, scheduling, and modifying the integrated data to improve automation. In other words, apart from enabling businesses to seamlessly integrate new digital technology, it enables businesses to leverage the full potential of different software working seamlessly together.
To read the full story on how the Alumio iPaaS helps businesses achieve integration success, download our new white paper - Simplifying digital transformation with the Alumio iPaaS.
Looking to experience first-hand how the Alumio iPaaS helps simplify software integrations for digital transformation? Click here to get a personalized demo from one of our integration specialists.