B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

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Components, Benefits, Challenges and Applications of B2B Integration 37
Have you purchased software Have you purchased software
for internal integration ? for B2B integration ?
No No
38% Yes 76% J= S
62%
24%
Percent of 50 companies Percent of 50 companies
interviewed interviewed
What was/is the biggest headache surrounding software integration?
Vendor problems
10%
Dealing with
Standards and |egacy systems
industry issues 27%
13%
Problems with •HM'*'
data formats 1^^ Internal
8% personnel
issues 42%
Percent of 50 companies interviewed
Figure 2.5. — Factors that make integration difficult
Standards and industry issues;
A bewildering array of application integration options provided by
different vendors to choose from; and
Data format problems.
The survey also found that out of 50 global companies, 62% purchased
software tools to hook together internal applications.
2.4.2. Disparate internal corporate data
Internal data integration is the single most expensive problem to fix.
The internal application integration issue becomes pretty complex for
companies that have application data scattered across several different
databases. For example, a large financial services institution may offer
several products — brokerage, mutual funds, insurance, credit cards and
savings accounts — but each product may be managed by its own
legacy accounting system. There is no easy way to link all of these
accounts together to let a customer see his or her entire portfolio of
products without having to be authenticated for each account.