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Business integration provides you with two primary things: real-time access to business information, and the insight needed to manage all of your critical processes. With business integration you see how business processes are performing, predict what might happen in the future and adjust those processes rapidly to address the changes faced by your business. Using business integration you can create new applications across your enterprise and realize significant increases in business process productivity.
A complete business integration platform will help harness your IT assets and construct the complex business processes that drive your enterprise. Selecting and deploying the right integration solution will give your company a key competitive differentiator, increase revenues, reduce costs, and help you deliver the best service to your customers.
In short, with business integration you can realize the full value of your IT investments and have a direct impact on your enterprise.
What to Look for in an Integration Vendor
Selecting the right business integration vendor is a challenge. The number of vendors promising a comprehensive and unified integration solution grows daily, as does the variety of approaches to solving the integration problem. While it is essential to focus on what is critical for your company, it is also important to evaluate vendors using a common set of metrics. This document uses customer feedback taken from a broad portfolio of evaluations to offer key factors and considerations to use when selecting an integration software vendor:
- Track record of customer success
- Proven corporate strength
- Speed of implementation
- Manageability
- Independence
- Mature architecture
- Completeness
- Scalability
- Strong partner network
- Coherent product strategy
1. Customer Success
The most important consideration is this: has the vendor made companies similar to yours successful? What is the vendor's track record, how do they treat customers, and how do their customers view them?
Why is this important?
- References. This is the biggest indicator of customer success. Talk to some of the current customers using the product and find out what they have to say about the vendor's contributions to their success. Be sure to determine that the reference has placed integrations into production.
- Methodology and best practices. Ask the direct question: "How will you make me successful with your product?" Consider the answer carefully. Look for a proven methodology to help you architect your integration solution that not only gets you into production quickly, but also enables you to stay in production as your enterprise integration needs change.
- Strong professional services, training and technical customer support. It is very important to select a vendor that provides you with mentoring, training, and "lighthouse" services that allow you to be self-sufficient in your implementation. Evaluate the quality of the customer support offerings and look for high customer satisfaction levels taken from independent surveys.
- Look for how actively the vendor solicits customer feedback to the future of the product. Determine how the vendor will address your future requirements and how the vendor will incorporate customer feedback into the future product roadmap.
Why webMethods?
- Production events. webMethods is the only vendor to report publicly the number of projects that go live, a figure that now exceeds 160 projects a quarter. This means that more than one company per day somewhere around the world is starting to get a positive return on their webMethods investment.
- Customer focus. webMethods' Global Customer Services group is dedicated to helping customers achieve successful implementation of webMethods products. The GCS provides complete lifecycle support in the implementation of webMethods' integration solutions through worldclass education, consulting and technical support services.
- Proven Integration Methodology. webMethods integration methodology, GEAR, represents the best practices and experiential knowledge gained from a vast portfolio of successful projects. GEAR is a proven guide for high-quality projects that are on-time, on-budget and easy to maintain.
- Customer Satisfaction. webMethods' revenue from existing customers consistently averages greater than 50% - a great measure of customer satisfaction.
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