Trends driving managed file transfer and B2B data exchange modernization

The most important business conversations your organization has are the daily digital exchanges of data with your customers and suppliers. Significant negative trends have emerged in the past few years, raising pressure on the critical software that most companies use to exchange business data within and outside their company, especially with their customers and suppliers. Your organization is likely feeling some challenges created by these trends.

Among the current key trends impacting file transfer and B2B systems, undoubtedly the main disruption comes from the overall increase in transaction volume. With the accelerated digitization of many business processes, organizations have seen unprecedented growth in their file transfer and B2B transactions in recent years.

Other trends include:

◉ A growing number of customers and suppliers. As more organizations look to increase the agility of their supply chain, they are adding suppliers.

◉ Expectations for faster response times. Many organizations are receiving response time objectives from their customers. Not replying to an inventory request or shipping date query fast enough means the customer may move on to the next supplier.

◉ IT and cloud efficiencies. By moving to the cloud, IT efficiencies are being explored in every IT department. Your company’s journey to the cloud can impact which solution best suits the digital conversation you have with your organization’s business partners.

◉ Increasing transaction complexity. As some customers and suppliers request semi-custom APIs and Hybrid EDI-API options, complexity soars.

◉ Increasing costs of data breaches. As found in the IBM Security report Cost of a data breach 2022, the cost of a breach has risen 12.5% as ransomware and destructive attacks surge.

Trends, challenges, disruptions

Ignoring these trends can be extremely costly. If not appropriately analyzed, trends can become challenges. And unaddressed IT challenges can become business disruptions. Businesses that ignore this landscape are more likely to experience order delays and interferences resulting in revenue loss, unexpected costs or customer dissatisfaction.

As these challenges remain unaddressed, IT teams are beset by tasks of increasing complexity driven by weak or inconsistent security and lack of visibility.

Siloed solutions and IT skills shortages are also common pain points. These challenges cause companies to struggle with their journey to the cloud and modernization efforts, leading to difficulty in scaling and slow onboarding of new customers or suppliers.

Is your business experiencing any of these IT trends in your file transfer or B2B transactions? Then you need modern solutions to meet and overcome IT challenges before they impact your business. And if your organization is not yet seeing these trends surface, then it’s important to start building the foundation for growth your business needs before the storm hits.

Businesses need a modern and reliable B2B data exchange solution built for demanding workloads. An effective solution must provide:

◉ Connectivity across a wide range of standards and protocols, data translation and validation

◉ End-to-end insight at the document, transaction and business level

◉ Rapid onboarding and efficient management of customers and partners

◉ Hybrid cloud, on-premises, and SaaS capabilities to support self-managed, vendor-managed or custom deployment

◉ Secure, scalable and reliable solutions for a diverse range of demanding workloads

IBM Sterling® Data Exchange is one such effective solution: a group of offerings built to improve the exchange of data with customers and suppliers, revolving around managed file transfer (MFT) and B2B integration. Take advantage of IBM’s long-standing experience in EDI, APIs and MFT business data exchange.

Source: ibm.com

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3 ways the auto industry benefits from simplified supplier collaboration

Managing a diverse and agile supplier network is now a top priority in the auto industry and essential to remain competitive. Whether shifting to produce electric vehicles, dealing with the semiconductor shortage or mitigating everyday disruptions, the automotive OEM and aftermarket supply chains, live and die by their supplier network. The need for innovation and modernization in automotive business networks is crucial to remove friction, enable visibility and build resiliency for whatever comes next.  

How will you ensure your organization is agile, resilient and adaptable enough to meet the challenges it faces? To paraphrase Charles Darwin, “It’s not the strongest of the species that survives, it’s the one most adaptable to change.” We can see this principle at play in the auto industry today: Tesla, in just a few short years, has become a market-leader in the plug-in and battery electric car sector. Contrast that with market-leading automakers that have experienced sales declines of 20 to 30% in North America over the course of the pandemic.  

Without a robust B2B network or simplified supplier relationships you can’t pivot. You can’t adapt quickly to  trends and changes. You can’t readily tap into new suppliers to capitalize on renewed demand. This is especially true in the automotive industry, where hundreds of suppliers and partners are fundamental to a company’s success.  

To ensure business continuity during times of extreme change and help position your organization for long-term growth, here are three ways you can increase the resilience of your supply chain and B2B networks: 

1. Automate supplier onboarding: One major reason companies can’t adapt adequately enough is because they can’t find and integrate the right suppliers in a timely manner. Ensure that suppliers and partners can be well-vetted, integrated, and quickly onboarded to your network. Solutions that automate vetting and onboarding can get suppliers online up to 75% faster. Those weeks and months saved, across hundreds of relationships, can be used for other innovative, value-driven work.

2. Increase flexibility and efficiency of B2B collaboration: Auto manufacturers manage an increasingly complex, multi-enterprise ecosystem, but it’s typically overwhelmed by disparate systems and disconnected processes. To compete in today’s hyper-connected global economy, you need to digitize and automate connectivity as much as technology will permit. In the process, you’ll streamline and simplify complex processes. Having real-time, digitally-connected relationships with the suppliers that matter most to your business is essential to remain competitive. Modern business networks, whether  on cloud, hybrid-cloud or even on premises, can provide those fast, real-time, digital connections and communications required to optimize the value you get out of your supplier base. They can help you break down walls and silos between organizations, streamline processes, and enable the bi-directional flow of data and information. Clear and quick communication and data exchange are the lifeblood of  collaborative supplier relationships. 

3. Modernize technology: Most automakers have a patchwork of supply chain and B2B network technologies that were never designed for today’s dynamic environment. That’s why focusing on modernizing your B2B network offers so much upside, like gaining the scalability and agility to keep pace with changing business and technology needs.

When you modernize your B2B platform by moving to a hybrid cloud or managed service, you can begin to transition from homegrown or acquired processes and applications that cause inefficiencies and errors. Best-in-class B2B networks can automate transactions, provide real-time data visibility and capitalize on AI to provide you with intelligent alerts on exceptions and disruptions, and more. Digital B2B networks are also proven to decrease document management tasks by 85%, prevent 80% or more of current errors, and cut unplanned downtime by 99%. 

Source: ibm.com

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Implement a zero trust strategy for your file transfers

The recent Kaseya ransomware attack is yet another reminder of the voracity of the war cybercriminals are waging on the business world. In 2020, scan-and-exploit became the top initial attack vector for surveyed organizations, surpassing phishing, according to the 2021 IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence Index. The report goes on to note that manufacturing was the second-most attacked industry in 2020 for respondents, up from eighth place the year prior, and second only to financial services. 

What’s behind these attacks?

Companies have invested a great deal in building castle-and-moat protections against external threats, focusing on protecting the DMZ or perimeter zone. In a world of known threats and less sophisticated techniques, this protection model worked reasonably well. But times have changed. 

Cybercriminals can be well resourced and tenacious and even backed by nation-states. They can leverage ever more sophisticated tools, such as Ransomware-as-a-Service, and can be incentivized by cryptocurrencies with their strong liquidity and poor traceability. As a result, they are well positioned in the arms race against traditional perimeter defenses. Clearly, it is time to consider a zero trust approach to help protect your most valuable resource—your data.

The rise of zero trust 

The problem with the castle-and-moat model is the primary focus on external defenses. Once inside, cybercriminals can generally move freely around without much impediment and wreak havoc. This has led to a broadening of the security perspective to encompass internal security, with what is termed the zero trust model. 

The Biden administration in the United States, recently issued an Executive Order calling for advancement towards a zero trust model within the federal government and among federal contractors. Subsequently, in response to multiple high-profile ransomware attacks, the White House also issued a memo to business executives urging them to protect against the threat of the ransomware. Such a model is an “evolving set” of concepts that move beyond “defenses from static, network-based perimeters” according to the National Institute of Standard and Technology (NIST).  

When a cybercriminal or organization has breached a perimeter and has access to your secure environment, typically they will start a stealth scan to build a map of your network. They will enumerate the server they are on for all its credentials and then will try those credentials on your other servers to travel laterally. Most breaches move from computer to computer over standard protocols such as SSH, FTP, SFTP, HTTP, and HTTPS. This means you need to have a strategy for restricting the spread or movement within your organization.  

Zero trust to protect your file transfers 

At IBM, our Sterling Secure File Transfer (SFT) solution is designed to align with a zero trust approach and harden servers to help reduce the possibility for ransomware or malware to travel laterally. The aim is to protect the inside of the castle – or inside the DMZ – to help safeguard internal intellectual property and assets. A zero trust approach requires securing and regulating movement between internal computers and servers and we begin by removing untrusted protocols.  

Our SFT solution is designed to include IBM Sterling Connect:Direct which uses a security-hardened protocol. When malware reaches out internally, it will not know how to ‘talk’ to the protocol. It can also check the IP address from the server that has requested access, and if that IP address is not on the internal list of trusted servers, which can be consistently updated, the receiving server automatically drops the session.  

In addition to these two internal security checkpoints, Connect:Direct can have additional checkpoints to further help prevent the spread of malware to another server. The malware also needs the correct credentials, which can be increased for additional protection of high-value servers, and only files with a specified name may be transferred.  

Each server that uses Connect:Direct becomes a checkpoint – and choke point – for malware. This zero trust approach in Connect:Direct hardens infrastructure and includes capabilities for zero trust practices for communications that can help mitigate risks of traditional protocols using FTP, SFTP and SSH. SFT can also encrypt data at rest and in transit, and provides multifactor authentication helping implement a zero trust strategy for your file transfers. 

So, if you have a traditional castle-and-moat security model, I urge you to consider implementing or expanding your zero trust strategy to help protect what is most valuable inside of your organization. You can start small and add more protections over time. The key is to begin now because the war will continue to escalate.

Source: ibm.com

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5 signs your B2B business needs a modern order management system

In the wake of an eCommerce wave that pumped 10 years of growth into just a 3-month period, B2B companies are under unexpected pressure to deliver digital experiences on par with those in the consumer space. In fact, more than 70% of B2B buyers say they are moving to remote or digital purchases. Are you prepared with a digital technology foundation that provides one connected view of inventory, orders and fulfillment so you can grow your eCommerce footprint and build stronger customer relationships in the process?

Let’s explore 5 signs your B2B business needs an order management system (OMS) that will allow you to drive new value for your customers and your business:

1. Fragmented view of inventory

◉ Are you confident that your available-to-promise (ATP) data is accurate enough that you can allocate inventory for on-time and in-full (OTIF) delivery?

◉ Is your inventory positioned to enable optimized fulfillment?

◉ Can you manage demand spikes and disruptions, transferring inventory to reduce delays?

If you answered ‘no’ to any of these questions, you’re not alone. Many B2B organizations still rely on custom Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems or legacy technology that function in siloed environments. These solutions were never designed to provide visibility into inventory across your organization and ecosystem of retailers, distributors, partners and suppliers. But if you can’t see inventory, you can’t effectively manage it or react quickly to disruptions and deliver exceptional B2B commerce experiences.

A lack of inventory visibility also creates blind spots for distributors and manufacturers. If distributors can only see inventory at their warehouse, and not what’s available at disparate supplier warehouses, they may miss inventory that could be drop-shipped for OTIF delivery and better customer outcomes. And when industrial manufacturers don’t know what’s planned or in-process in their manufacturing plants, they can’t provide customers a real-time picture of inbound inventory that is available to be promised.

By augmenting your existing ERP or legacy system with an aggregated view of inventory, wherever it resides – across divisions, geographies, channels and partners – you can optimize fulfillment to capture maximum demand. User friendly tools, insights and automation allow you to simplify complex inventory actions such as segmentation and substitution. And when supply chain disruptions happen, real-time alerts let you manage through them proactively.

2. Lack of visibility into SLAs

To limit their business risk, B2B customers use contracts based on service level agreements (SLAs) and set thresholds to make sure they get the right product at the right place and time for the right price. They hold you to that promise and impose penalties if the business doesn’t deliver.

A modern OMS empowers you with end-to-end visibility across the supply chain ecosystem to track orders from request through fulfillment. Insights to improve planning and execution, automated workflows to quote and process orders faster, and dashboard alerts to monitor KPIs such as OTIF or expedited freight, allow you to consistently manage effectively against customer SLAs.

3. Cumbersome order validation and pricing 

Complex orders are a fact of life, and business policies and customer contracts add rules and restrictions. Some customers may qualify for volume-based pricing or require validation for certain SKUs before their orders can be processed. These steps slow down or stall when human intervention is needed to coordinate across different divisions and partners.

Implementing a modern OMS to drive your B2B eCommerce experience will allow you to deliver personalized buying experiences based on individual customer relationships. Offering custom online sales catalogs with permissioned products, and embedding unique pricing, products and service configuration rules, makes it easy to consistently deliver the perfect order while flawlessly executing large volumes of complex orders.

4. Inefficiencies in manual processes

Think about all the touchpoints across the order lifecycle where you rely on manual processes that are time-consuming and error prone. The more complex your order management process, the more difficult it is to scale for growth if employee involvement is required for order execution. And when it comes to picking the optimized fulfillment option, employees simply can’t be aware of all the cost and profit drivers and real-time trade-offs that need to be made to lead to the best possible choice.

With a multi-enterprise OMS, you can automate certain processes and incorporate AI-enabled insights so that staff can make smarter sourcing and fulfillment decisions, even when dealing with intricate product and service configurations and fulfillment types. Unifying production schedules, sourcing options and inventory availability across multiple entities takes the guesswork out of delivery estimates. You’ll reduce costly errors, find the true lowest cost-to-serve option, improve customer service and reduce business risk.

5. Can’t meet customer expectations for eCommerce experiences

B2C markets have set the standard B2B buyers have come to expect, leaving many B2B organizations faced with the pressure to develop systems fast. Visibility across the supply chain and scalability to keep up with spikes in demand are crucial to meet customer expectations. But many B2B organizations rely on rudimentary online catalogs with manual processes and legacy systems to allocate orders, often on a “first come, first serve” basis. It’s hard to accelerate new digital experiences when you’re relying on traditional constructs for contracts, pricing and configuration.

Powering your eCommerce experience with an OMS built for B2B enables faster and more efficient delivery at the lowest cost-to-serve, even during peak periods. Digitized processes and intelligent workflows enable dynamic pricing and configuration through collaboration and automation. You can create a modern, digital environment for buyers that includes consolidated, personalized views that make ordering easy. And, you can leverage insights to improve demand sensing, order promising, sourcing decisions, and provide transparency so buyers can get their questions answered, like: “Where is my order right now? When can I expect delivery?”

The pressure is on for B2B organizations to embrace the eCommerce challenge and deliver modern ordering and fulfillment experiences. If any of these five signs resonate with you and your organization, let IBM help you ride today’s eCommerce wave. IBM Sterling Order Management is a multi-enterprise order management solution that enhances customer experience, increases revenue and improves operational margin. Built for B2B, it picks up where ERP and legacy platforms leave off, so you can accelerate new digital experiences for your customers and lower total cost of ownership.

Source: ibm.com

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4 organizations adopt B2B order management technology to optimize their supply chain

COVID-19 rapidly accelerated eCommerce, with 10 years of e-commerce adoption compressed into a three month period. With more customers than ever relying on digital purchasing, B2B organizations are now confronting increased pressure on their existing systems for order management and inventory visibility. And while the digital approach for B2B purchasing started during the pandemic as a crisis response, it’s here to stay. Only about 20% of B2B buyers hope to return to in-person sales, meaning that B2B organizations need to lay a modern digital foundation for the new normal. B2B customers also increasingly expect the same personalized, frictionless buying experience that they experience in B2C markets, with visibility into their orders and real-time fulfillment options.

Read More: C2090-913: IBM Informix 4GL Development

The majority of B2B organizations still rely on Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems alone, which function in siloed environments, and regard inventory, orders, and fulfillment as separate units instead of one connected workflow or view of data. With this approach, B2B organizations often face slower production, delivery, and service, leading to inefficiencies and increased costs.

IBM Sterling Order Management for B2B

With so much complexity to maneuver, and the need for a customer-first approach, manufacturers and distributors need to consider digitally transforming with an order management system (OMS). A modern order management system empowers B2B organizations to enhance automation, accelerate operations, and reduce errors — all while optimizing the supply chain and the customer experience.

B2B organizations can implement order management technology to remove friction and create value for themselves, their supplier network, and their customers. Here are some great examples:

1. With their drop-ship activity trending upward, one technology distributor struggled with taking ownership of their inventory. Products were shipped direct from their supplier warehouses, but the company couldn’t see past their own warehouses into those of their extended supplier network. With this lack of visibility into what was available-to -promise, they couldn’t deliver the best B2B omnichannel experience for their customers. And, they needed help allocating orders more effectively. With their legacy system, they fulfilled orders on a “first come, first serve” basis, rather than prioritizing based on customer SLAs or competing priorities. On top of that, the technology distributor also faced challenges with the tedious, manual internal bidding process for manufacturers.

To automate the bidding process so they can quickly detect the best sourcing option to maximize customer satisfaction and optimize costs for themselves, the technology distributor now leverages a modern OMS. This solution helps increase inventory visibility, provide dynamic sourcing and fulfillment options, ease collaboration, and create a transparent workflow. They’re able to prioritize SLAs with real-time visibility into exactly what inventory is available-to-promise and utilize dynamic sourcing to investigate the tradeoffs of shipping from their own warehouses versus from those of their suppliers to fulfill customer orders at the lowest cost and highest service level.

2. An automotive company’s aftermarket business produces vehicle parts and equipment after the sale of a car from the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) — distributing their parts to online retailers and independent distributors. After orders came in through their electronic data interchange (EDI), order administrators at the manufacturer completed manual tasks, called their warehouses to ensure they have enough inventory, checking the capacity of trucks to ship out products, and checking for account holds. To make things more complex, all this data sits across multiple systems. With no upfront validation, it made it challenging to keep up with SLAs and deliver their inventory efficiently to customers.

By using an OMS, inventory is consolidated into one environment to provide a single view of available-to-promise inventory, better validating each order. The 4000+ locations in the fulfillment network are all on the OMS platform to help efficiently fulfill orders and provide multiple fulfillment options at the lowest cost to serve. The OMS also plugs into their EDI — automating the order workflow and reducing manual touchpoints during order processing to enable faster and more efficient delivery to customers.

3. A third-party logistics organization began expanding their services offering to pick, pack, and ship orders for small and medium retailers, but quickly realized that their existing technology wasn’t built to scale with this shifting model. The complex manual processes involved in managing the inventory of their customers required automation. As they grew this new component of their business and scaled to hundreds of customers, they needed an OMS that could provide multi-channel fulfillment capabilities and deliver frictionless customer experiences.

Leveraging multi-tenant architecture in their new order management system, they can more effectively manage the orders and inventory of multiple autonomous customers in one place. With quick implementation in under 8 weeks, they start creating immediate value as they onboard customers to their new services offering.

4. With the start of COVID-19, and a spike in online ordering, a heavy duty vehicles aftermarket parts distributor urgently needed to develop an eCommerce system that could handle their B2B ordering. Their existing system relied on a rudimentary online catalog, and once orders were placed, an employee had to make manual decisions about fulfillment and delivery. Reliance on manual efforts created room for error and limited optimization. Their custom ERP lacked inventory consolidation and a connection between data sources to truly see what was available-to-promise.

The distributor sought out an order management system that could power their new eCommerce system with added inventory visibility and scalability. With this solution, they can reduce manual touch-points in the order fulfillment process by using automation to find the most efficient fulfillment option within their distribution centers’ delivery radius. In an industry where timeliness is critical, they are now able to find optimal delivery nodes and ensure on-time delivery — even on the same day.

“Historically our business has had to run B2B fulfillment processes manually because of our legacy systems. With IBM OMS, we have the capability in a consolidated platform to provide realtime inventory visibility and optimized order orchestration for our ecommerce channel which will result in a better customer experience”

–Mohit Jain, CIO at Fleetpride

With growing complexity and customer demands for B2B organizations, order and inventory management solutions, with precise, real-time inventory counts and the ability to help better manage SLAs, are the answer for B2B organizations looking to transform their business. IBM Sterling Order Management empowers B2B organizations to increase automation, accelerate operations, and reduce errors — all while optimizing the supply chain and delivering on customer promises.

Source: ibm.com

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3 steps to help protect your B2B transactions and file exchanges from security threats

Today’s cyber security landscape is evolving as hackers take advantage of digital and hyper connectivity to creatively access networks and systems. We have observed that ransomware attacks are increasing and using new tactics. And supply-chain attacks like SolarWinds and Accellion that take advantage of third-party systems and software to find backdoor entries into enterprises, spread malware with one of the common motives to steal sensitive data or disrupt operations. Whenever a breach occurs, it can take time to detect, is typically difficult to eradicate, and can cause ongoing and significant damage over a long period of time. Recent analysis by IBM estimates the average cost of a data breach at $3.86 million, with mega breaches (50 million records or more stolen) reaching $392 million.

So, what can you do to help safeguard your B2B transactions and file exchanges and mitigate risk to high-value digital assets? These three steps can help enterprises strengthen their security posture:

◉ Limit the exposure to threats.

◉ Limit the spread if it’s already inside your network.

◉ Recover and get back to business.

Let’s look at each one of these points briefly.

How do you limit the exposure? To help prevent intruders from sneaking into your trusted zones you should establish a strong foundation by covering the digital entry points where external information comes into your enterprise safe zones, starting with the most susceptible points to the least. Your IT security teams might be following best practices, like encryption, permission models, secure access and authentication. However, when it comes to internet-facing information and file exchanges with your trading partner community, you should have an even higher level of security that a defense-in-depth strategy provides.

With accelerating digitization, many enterprises today conduct large volumes of internet-based transactions. Implementing strong edge security for your Managed File Transfer (MFT) solution can help identify whether incoming payloads are clean and coming from trusted sources. It’s a complex challenge with thousands of trading partners knocking on your enterprise doors multiple times a day, using multiple routes and protocols, and delivering information in various formats. This does not make life easy for an MFT system and a security administrator. The inflow is never consistent, and the payload varies by size.

It’s like an airport terminal with thousands of travelers entering and exiting the terminal every minute of the day. Similar to an effective file transfer solution, the security gate helps manage the inflow, but you can imagine the risk even if one ill-intentioned person, behaving as an ordinary traveler, sneaks through. You also should have robust security capabilities that are built-in (like full body scanners at security gates) as well as advanced configured capabilities (think extra screening or K-9s sniffing baggage randomly).

In the case of MFT, a few of these security capabilities include: multifactor authentication, validating incoming connections in real-time with sources that are updated frequently, scanning the files for viruses before they land into the trusted zone and ensuring that no data ever lands on disk in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Also consider the versatility of the edge security capability since it doesn’t operate in isolation. Implementing a robust edge security solution, like IBM Sterling Secure Proxy, with flexible options to configure and integrate with other solutions in your existing technology stack can be important to limiting exposure to security breaches.

How do you limit the spread? Despite all your best efforts, there is a chance you might find a bad actor within your trusted zones. What’s important then is to try to prevent it from spreading further and wreaking more havoc. One way is by allowing only listed servers to talk to authorized systems. Another best practice is to avoid use of common protocols like FTP, and instead use proprietary protocols like IBM Sterling Connect:Direct over SFTP, which can help provide high-volume and security-rich enterprise file transfers. Restricting the number of endpoints and using proprietary protocols and a solution architected for enterprise-class secured file transfer, can help limit the damage due to the spread and assists in the next step – recovery.

How do you recover? Once you identify the impacted systems, you should immediately clean and restore the environment. Restoration can involve a complete rebuild of the systems from the operating system up and changing all credentials and certificates. The process often requires having multiple stores or managing them individually on each server, which gets complex very quickly and is time consuming. A solution like IBM Sterling Partner Engagement Manager (PEM) can make it possible to change all credentials and certificates in one place. With the use of campaigns, updates to credentials and certificates with trading partners can be handled automatically, saving time and limiting the risk and duration of business interruption.

There is no magic bullet to guarantee 100% protection from security incidents. However, by following these three steps you can decrease your risk exposure, limit damage and build resiliency into your systems to recover quickly.

Source: ibm.com

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5 ways modern B2B infrastructure fuels efficiencies in the energy and utilities sector

A significant portion of the population is now working from home. That trend will likely continue, as 83% of companies surveyed expect hybrid workplaces to become the norm. When power outages occur due to extreme hot or cold weather as recently experienced in the U.S., shortages of water, food and heat are inevitable. Even worse, these events are to blame for lost lives and billions of dollars in costs. And now, with more remote staff and few with home generators, an outage can hamper business productivity as never before. In these extreme situations it is imperative that IT infrastructure supporting the exchange of capacity and usage information remain highly available without disruption.

There are many reasons why energy and utility companies may experience downtime. In our work with energy and utility clients worldwide, we see five areas IT leaders and B2B managers are focusing on to build resilience and help mitigate risk of service disruptions.

Let’s explore:

1. Modernization

If you have a legacy or homegrown system or multiple, point solutions that aren’t integrated to enable full interoperability, it’s time to modernize your B2B infrastructure. As employees retire, many B2B managers and IT leaders are having trouble replacing the traditional skill sets and tribal knowledge required to operate these complex systems. Digital B2B networks can simplify and automate connectivity with trading partners and provide additional visibility to help you understand capacity, determine if you can meet demand requests, and better allocate supply. Take a fresh look at today’s modern, flexible solutions and how they can be customized to meet your needs and evolve with you. A comprehensive solution that includes all the capabilities to support your environment is simpler to use and lowers the total cost of ownership.

41% faster partner onboarding and 51% more efficient management of B2B transactions

– Business Value Highlights, IDC report

2. Availability

As part of modernization, consider moving to the cloud for availability and resilience. B2B infrastructure that’s available as a cloud or hybrid solution, provides flexibility to auto-scale.  As demand shifts, you can scale up or down to meet changing transaction volumes and manage costs. With options for EDI and API connectivity, you can work seamlessly with both large and small trading partners and establish secure, repeatable workflows for data movement internally and externally.

“Keep systems operational, essentially 24/7.”

– Eric Doty, Greenworks Tools

3. Compliance

Wholesale and retail energy firms need a way to reliably and securely exchange, track and reconcile transactions between producers, operators, pipelines, services and marketers. B2B solutions need to be optimized for the energy marketplace and support standards, including North American Energy Standards Board (NAESB) compliance, which is a backbone data exchange standard for all energy trading markets in North America. Particularly important during times of disruption, regulatory adherence simplifies and accelerates the ability to source power from other regions that are generating power at a surplus, or supply other regions when you can fill the void.

4. Security

The average cost of a data breach in the energy sector rose 14.1% between 2019- 2020, to an average of $6.39 million—the largest increase and second highest average cost among all sectors surveyed. Modern B2B infrastructure ensures secure and reliable information exchange between key customers and suppliers with tools for user- and role-based access. Using the latest standards and encryption policies protects data of all types, at rest and in motion—customer, financial, order, supply, Internet of Things (IoT), regulatory reporting and more.

5. Innovation

NAESB puts blockchain at the top of its list of significant technologies that will reshape the energy industry. Deemed a “high-value area,” NAESB will remain active in the development of supportive standards and continue involvement as the energy industry continues to adopt applications for the technology. For example, the industry forum is looking at digital smart contracts to improve and automate transactions and accounting cycles for power trading. Prepare for the future with a modern, hosted service that can add capabilities like blockchain, which provides multi-party visibility of a permissioned, immutable shared records that fuel trust across the value chain. Evolve in lock step with the energy trading market for competitive advantage.

In our increasingly connected world, service disruptions shine a light on the need for greater resilience in the energy and utility sector. As you face the certainty of change in marketplaces, technology and industry standards, you need a fast, flexible and secure B2B infrastructure so you can continue to deliver exceptional service anywhere, anytime. Let IBM show you how we can simplify your B2B journey and extend the value of your existing investments while driving innovations that propel you forward.

Source: ibm.com

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Why B2B organizations need an advanced order and inventory management solution

Many B2B companies, including those in automotive, electronics, and manufacturing, are at a crossroads with their sales and inventory management processes. Historically, they’ve been reliant on legacy or ERP systems – tools that were designed for predictable, back office business processes. As B2B commerce becomes more digital, these organizations require a system that is more agile, scalable, and adaptable to meet customers’ changing needs.

“With our homegrown solution, there was no single record for deals or inventory information unless you went back and tried to reassemble things­­– which in many of our back offices was impossible.”

VP of worldwide business systems, motion controls technology

As supply chains either rapidly slowed down or accelerated in 2020, the lack of agility in these tools became abundantly clear. Manual processes are also making it more challenging to adapt in a time where disruptions are everywhere. By relying on manual processes, organizations are subject to increased human error, delay of goods, and higher costs to do business. On top of these challenges, B2B consumers are demanding a more B2C experience with seamless ordering and self-service, and manual processes can’t deliver.

An omnichannel order and inventory management solution empowers your business to maximize results by automating business rules that are right for your customers and your company, while supporting the agility and scalability requirements driven by today’s customer expectations.

Let’s explore the benefits in more detail:

1. Automate sales orders

With the help of the right B2B order management system, you can accept orders via multiple sales platforms, saving time as you easily manage your inventory, create a new order, update an order, and process the payment. Consolidate sales information from multiple channels so you can track your inventory and orders in a single platform. This gives you the flexibility needed to source and allocate orders more efficiently across your network.

2. Reduce manual work

An advanced order management solution processes large B2B orders at the line level — providing more flexibility around splitting orders and managing different workflows on the same order. Sourcing rules are much more extensive to support scenarios like order prioritization, substitutions, and customer level requirements.

3. Real-time global inventory

Get up-to-the-minute inventory tracking and accurate available-to-promise data with a global view of inventory across all your business units. Having one picture of inventory enables you to accurately sell omnichannel inventory, including in-transit, and allows your customers to place one consolidated order with a single invoice. Reduce over-promising by identifying exactly what inventory you have and where it is, with stock thresholds and alerts that ensure you always know when to replenish to prevent lost sales.

“We have a couple of centers that used to have to log in to about 17 different systems to view our operations. Now they essentially go to just a single screen.”

VP of worldwide business systems, motion controls technology

4. On-time delivery

B2B customers have high expectations for on time, in-full (OTIF) delivery, and some may have pre-established SLAs to hold you to that promise, with penalties when the order is not received on time. Failing to meet these expectations can impact your brand’s reputation, customer satisfaction, and future sales. With an order management solution that pulls together a real-time, multi-enterprise view of your inventory, you feel confident to meet your customers’ promises and expectations.

5. Grow your business

Scalability is important to meet increasing expectations, changing strategies, and organizational growth. An order and inventory management solution transforms your ERP to face these challenges head on. Whether you have an unusually high “peak” season, or your competitor has a recall that hurts their sales but skyrockets yours – the system can easily handle the automation, inventory fluctuation, and OTIF delivery promise. A scalable system gives you the capacity you need to succeed today and grow for tomorrow.

Order and inventory management solutions are perfect for B2B companies because they automate the typically manual, paper-based system that an ERP delivers. And the best benefit of all? Order and inventory management solutions are built with your customers’ experience in mind.

Transform your ERP with real-time inventory control to meet customer promises

Source: ibm.com

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3 ways to avoid EDI pitfalls during peak events

Over the last year, consumers and business buyers have dramatically changed how they procure products and services, highlighting just how important digital transformation now is to building resilience. During expected or unexpected peak events, IT leaders and B2B managers need confidence that their B2B infrastructure operating behind the scenes — connecting retailers, distributors, manufacturers and suppliers throughout the lifecycle of a customer order — can keep pace as demand spikes.

As you face peak events and the certainty of change, here are three ways you can shore up your B2B systems and infrastructure to be ready for surges in EDI transaction volumes.

1. Keep orders flowing in the cloud

As orders for products surge and are fulfilled, you need to replenish inventory — fast. Orders must continue to flow across your supply chain to ensure distributors ship additional products to stores or warehouses, and manufacturers have the supplies they need to make more products and keep the pipeline full. But if your EDI system slows under mounting transaction volumes or worse, completely fails, you lose the ability to communicate with your trading partners and receive orders from your customers. Critical transactions, like orders and ship notices, are delayed.

Eric Doty of Greenworks Tools keeps orders flowing without hiring more staff with a cloud-enabled multi-enterprise business network that enables reliable, secure and scalable B2B exchanges. As this power equipment manufacturing company expands its global presence, the network provides a more efficient and cost-effective way to track the increasing number of orders. The solution digitizes and automates transactions and uses AI technology to deliver deeper insights into B2B processes.

With visual reports and natural language queries, business users can quickly track the status of an order without help from IT to make faster and more-informed decisions and deliver better customer service. Greenworks Tools is keeping up with global B2B transaction growth and realizing a 40 percent IT cost savings by putting EDI insights into the hands of business users.

2. Get flexibility to auto-scale

2020 has taught us that peak events can happen at any time for a variety of reasons. There are black swan events like a pandemic, but weather, seasonal, regional, and industry-specific events are far more common. Sometimes you can anticipate disruptions, and other times you can’t. Either way, you can eliminate worry by being prepared. A business network that’s available as a cloud or hybrid solution, makes it fast and easy to scale up or down to support growing or slowing transaction volumes and manage costs.

Cinram links some of Europe’s biggest media producers and retailers with consumers of music, TV shows and movies, helping to keep shelves stocked with popular titles. Volumes spike during peak periods, but also when highly-anticipated media releases become available. With a cloud-based business network, Cinram has maintained close to 100 percent uptime and can easily scale up the system when business volumes spike. They can add EDI connections rapidly without having to worry about provisioning new hardware to deliver the consistent, fast response and reliable service their clients have come to expect.

3. Invest in proven B2B infrastructure

To keep pace with demand peaks, like those some industries saw due to COVID-19, you need the capability to and suppliers quickly. Faster onboarding means eliminating slow and error-prone manual processes with more efficient digitized processes. IT leaders are doing this now with B2B infrastructure built for multi-enterprise connectivity, automation of manual processes, and transaction visibility to exchange necessary information without disruption.

Saint-Gobain, a leading global manufacturer of abrasives, is putting their cloud-based, B2B infrastructure to work every day, all day, and have cut costs per line order by 92 percent. They are transacting securely with customers through EDI rather than manually and onboarding new customers faster. They have moved several vendors to EDI, all using one generic map. And Chase Shelby, eBusiness Manager, aims to bring on as many customers to EDI as possible to drive further efficiency and gain competitive advantage. With automation and visibility, they are receiving orders 24×7 and providing customers real-time updates on order and shipment status.

They’re also simplifying the inherent complexity in their environment, even when one PO may include made-to-order products and stock products, or a complementary product from one of Saint-Gobain’s partners that will be drop shipped. In one simple query, customer service reps can retrieve all documents related to the PO for streamlined tracking. Automation has freed-up customer service reps for other value-added tasks, and Shelby points to additional savings from moving some of the in-house server load to the cloud.

Business buyers’ procurement expectations have changed forever, and there’s no turning back to phone and paper-based transactions. So, B2B managers must increasingly look to digital channels to meet demand and build resilience. With a proven B2B infrastructure that is available as a cloud or hybrid cloud option, there’s no need to worry about keeping orders flowing with your customers and suppliers or scaling up or down easily. IT leaders and B2B managers can take on peak events and the certainty of change with confidence.

Source: ibm.com

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5 tips for modern B2B order orchestration

Have you been tasked to transform your B2B order orchestration operations because of the enormous supply and demand disruptions experienced in 2020? You’re not alone. In a recent online interactive session, supply chain leaders at industrial companies and OEMs told us that their top priorities include flawless order orchestration, real-time inventory availability and accurate and on-time fulfillment.

Joe Cicman, Senior Analyst at Forrester, and I, offered advice and answered questions about how to address gaps in technology and processes to tackle these priorities. Here are five tips we shared for B2B organizations to get started:

1. Start with your digital experience strategy

Any investments in digital experience technology should be driven by your digital experience strategy and your customer journey. Work closely with your customer experience team to:

◉ Define business and brand objectives

◉ Identify customers’ digital interactions and devices

◉ Prioritize and fund interactions that benefit customers and are valuable to you

Your digital experience strategy will also help you determine how to prioritize initiatives like developing direct-to-consumer models, expanding into marketplaces, and leveraging the power of cloud. Your priorities need to be informed by your customers, not outside forces and trends.

2. Layer in modern technology

Industrial businesses and manufacturers often grow through mergers and acquisitions and have multiple legacy technologies already in place, including siloed ERP systems for different brands and geographies. Fortunately, with today’s modern order orchestration technology, companies can transform their order orchestration capabilities without doing a complete technology overhaul. By providing a layer of process on top of systems of record, order orchestration insulates the business from the complexity of having to migrate or merge existing ERP systems. You can quickly bring to market new capabilities that drive value for your business and customers.

For supply chain leaders who tackled the challenge years ago with a homegrown order management system, it’s time to take a fresh look at what’s available today. Unless you have a team of software engineers skilled in the latest technology, there’s probably a lot of capabilities you aren’t taking advantage of — and potentially losing opportunities to drive revenue, increase efficiencies, and reduce costs. You’ll also be pleasantly surprised with the flexibility of today’s solutions and how they can be tailored to meet your unique business needs.

3. Focus your digital experience technology strategy

Innovative firms tell Forrester they use the following principles to help focus their digital experience technology strategy:

◉ Define a digital experience roadmap – not a one-time web or mobile project – to guide your plan and ensure you gain strategic value.

◉ Use customer journey maps to bring relevancy to your investment by allowing you to identify points of friction and prioritize.

◉ Focus on a digital experience platform and a digital operations platform for the core of your technology investment.

◉ Shape your vendor choices by considering solutions that are cloud-hosted, mobile first, insights driven and loosely coupled.

These technology principles help lay a foundation for the future that enables business responsiveness and cost reduction.

4. Build momentum with quick wins

The sooner you can demonstrate you’re driving revenue and optimizing costs, the more support you’ll gain to expand your digital experience program. To do this, start by taking inventory of what you have and where you are in your journey. Understand what is currently hindering you from moving forward, so you can identify what you can do to help improve processes or remove any blockers. Find ways to minimize risk and achieve continuity in your business.

When you look at technology, like order management platforms, there is a natural place to start and progress. Inventory visibility is a clear first step; it’s quick and efficient to implement. With real-time, end-to-end inventory views across divisions, geographies, channels and partners, you can see where shortages exist and inventory resides. A central dashboard makes it easier to manage inventory across your fulfillment network with views into key business metrics and events. Inventory visibility also unlocks other use cases to mature your order orchestration operations.

5. Address the culture shift

Implementing technology is one thing, but getting your team on board is another. Culture is the glue that binds people, processes and technology. Identifying the behaviors impeding innovation and transformation efforts is the key to understanding which cultural attributes you need to address. Risk aversion, product-driven decisions, siloed work patterns, and hierarchical accountability will all slow digital transformation and cause systemic problems that will make it difficult to extract value from transformation efforts. Companies that embrace the digital experience foster a culture Forrester describes as customer obsessed, empathetic, agile, collaborative, and experimental.

While it’s true that retailers pioneered omnichannel order management, now is an ideal time for B2B companies to take advantage of the comprehensive suite of order orchestration capabilities that are available in the market today. Many B2B companies who got on board early have reaped the benefits of increased revenue, streamlined processes and optimized supply chains. Embracing modern technology to empower your people, processes, and mitigate supply chain disruptions is essential to success now more than ever.

Source: ibm.com

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3 ways to avoid EDI pitfalls during the holiday season

Despite the disruptions of 2020, total U.S. retail sales are projected to grow to more than $741 billion this holiday season. To help make this time of year a bright spot for customers, retailers and their suppliers need to know they can meet rising expectations and deliver the right products at the right place and time. What does this mean for IT leaders and B2B managers? Having confidence that the B2B infrastructure operating behind the scenes – connecting retailers, distributors, manufacturers and suppliers throughout the lifecycle of a customer order – can keep pace as demand spikes.

As you face a holiday season like none other and the certainty of change, here are three things to be mindful of as EDI transaction volumes increase across your B2B systems and infrastructure:

1. Keep orders flowing

As orders for products surge and are fulfilled, you need to replenish that inventory – fast. Orders must continue to flow up your supply chain to ensure distributors ship additional products to stores or warehouses, and manufacturers have the supplies they need to make more products and keep the pipeline full. But if your EDI system slows under mounting transaction volumes or worse, completely fails, you lose the ability to communicate with your trading partners and receive orders from your customers. Critical transactions, like orders and ship notices, are delayed.

Eric Doty of Greenworks Tools keeps orders flowing without hiring more staff by moving their EDI services to a cloud-enabled multi-enterprise business network that enables reliable, secure and scalable B2B exchanges. As this power equipment manufacturing company expands its global presence, the network provides a more efficient and cost-effective way to track the increasing number of orders. The solution digitizes and automates transactions and uses AI technology to deliver deeper insights into B2B processes. With visual reports and natural language queries, business users can quickly track the status of an order without help from IT to make faster and more-informed decisions to deliver better customer service. Greenworks Tools is keeping up with global B2B transaction growth and realizing a 40% IT cost savings by putting EDI insights into the hands of business users.

2. Flexibility to scale up and down

If 2020 has taught us nothing else, it’s that peak events can happen at any time for a variety of reasons. There are black swan events like a pandemic, but weather, seasonal, regional, and industry-specific events are far more common. Sometimes you can anticipate disruptions, and other times you can’t. Either way, you can eliminate much of the worry by being prepared. A business network that’s available as a cloud or hybrid solution, makes it fast and easy to scale up or down to support growing or slowing transaction volumes and manage costs.

Cinram links some of Europe’s biggest media producers and retailers with consumers of music, TV shows and movies, helping to keep shelves stocked with popular titles. Volumes spike during holiday periods, but also when highly-anticipated media releases become available. With a cloud-based business network, Cinram has maintained close to 100% uptime and can easily scale up the system when business volumes spike. They can add EDI connections rapidly without having to worry about provisioning new hardware to deliver the consistent, fast response and reliable service their clients have come to expect.

3. Proven B2B infrastructure

To keep pace with holiday shopping spikes or demand peaks, like those some industries saw due to COVID-19, your trading partners need to have seamless connectivity to exchange necessary information without disruption. IT leaders are doing this now with B2B infrastructure built for multi-enterprise connectivity and visibility that repeatedly demonstrates the ability to process unprecedented year-over-year transaction volume growth.

Li & Fung, a global leader in supply chain solutions, puts their B2B infrastructure to the ultimate test each year. The company oversees logistics for China’s Singles’ Day – the biggest shopping event in the world. For IT leader Manuel Fernandez, infrastructure that runs smoothly and is scalable for flawless performance is vital. Li & Fung integrates with 15,000 suppliers and thousands of customers using a single platform to automate B2B exchanges and gain data visibility to catch issues, allowing them to standardize and save costs. With flexibility to scale to handle ever-increasing transaction volumes, as well as exponential spikes – peaking at 1.5 million transactions per hour on Singles’ Day, four times the volume of the previous year – Li & Fung operates worldwide with speed and accuracy to meet service level agreements consistently.

This year, transaction numbers started to climb as early as October, reflecting an elongated holiday sales cycle. With a B2B infrastructure that continuously sets new transaction processing records and is available as a cloud or hybrid cloud option, there’s no need to worry about keeping orders flowing with your customers and suppliers. And that’s making this time of year a bright spot – not just for customers, but for IT leaders and B2B managers too.

Source: ibm.com

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Standardizing and consolidating data exchange to solve the secure file transfer puzzle

Over the last few months, my family and many others have slowed down and spent more quality time together. We’ve streamed movies and shows, played board games and, most recently, done puzzles together.

While working on a puzzle with my family, I realized that at work, my team’s goal is also solving “puzzles” in the form of complex business problems for our clients. Most of these complex problems help clients efficiently deal with the exponential rise in data exchange, simplify file transfer, and unleash the power of data more capably to the business – without sacrificing security.

Solving your business puzzles

Well before the global pandemic, the exponential growth in size and volume of files (and data) being transferred within enterprises and across partner ecosystems, was straining organizations of all sizes. The increasing number of endpoints and devices spread across the globe, the rise in remote work, and business users who expect simple, modern interfaces to support their workflows, are driving significant change in file transfer solution needs. For example, one study found that having a remote workforce increases the average total cost of a data breach to $4 million per breach. Meanwhile, unprecedented data threats are justifiably leading to tightened security policies and compliance mandates – like Payment Card Industry Security Standards (PCI DSS) and Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 – requiring better governance over file exchanges.

Adapting to all these changes is increasingly difficult, as most organizations’ Managed File Transfer (MFT) infrastructure has evolved in complex and unwieldy ways over time. Did you know that on average, organizations have nine file transfer systems — with some in use for almost a decade and 55 percent of systems integration relies on successful file transfers? Multiple legacy systems create a lack of visibility into and control of file transfers, making it impossible to proactively correct failures or anticipate delays before they impact downstream business activities.

Leaders across industries are overcoming these challenges by modernizing their approach to data exchange. Equifax is a prime example. They have experienced an increase in file transfer volumes over the past three years. To effectively manage that growth, they consolidated seven file transfer platforms in North America with more deployed globally and modernized their B2B data exchange environment which became a cornerstone of their digital transformation initiatives. Another example, is from Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), who were able to simplify their MFT environment for an easier administration experience.

Move data securely at speed and scale

To help clients quickly, easily and securely modernize their B2B data exchange environments, IBM is announcing the availability of IBM Sterling Secure File Transfer v2.0. It is a bundle that provides a unified file transfer platform so you can securely move and track mission-critical information within your enterprise and across your partner network. Sterling Secure File Transfer v2.0 has everything you need to handle your gateway and point-to-point data movement requirements with visibility, management and advanced security capabilities to govern and protect your enterprise.

Sterling Secure File Transfer v2.0 provides enhancements to a number of existing capabilities, including:

◉ Visibility – Modern user experiences simplify tracking of critical events across your MFT environment for improved operations, customer service and B2B governance.

◉ Management – Automatic health monitoring simplifies identification of potential issues impacting performance.

◉ Security – Dynamic virus scanning for incoming files, advanced IP address validation, and built-in Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) support helps protect your organization against external threats.

Figure 1: Visibility capabilities in Secure File Transfer v2.0 

Sterling Secure File Transfer v2.0 also introduces new capabilities focused on cloud deployment:

◉ Support for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform simplifies deployment across hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure, helping lower costs while enhancing scalability for your business needs.

◉ Centralized lifecycle management helps you maintain existing and deploy new MFT endpoints with standardized builds to increase efficiency and reduce response times.

Sterling Secure File Transfer v2.0 is available in multiple editions designed to meet the needs of small, medium and large businesses.

I’m proud of the work our experts do to build reliable, secure and automated solutions. We love a good puzzle so I hope you’ll take a few minutes to learn more about how we can help you solve your toughest managed file transfer puzzles by contacting me or reaching out to your IBM representative.

Source: ibm.com

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Modernize and scale your enterprise IT architecture with containers technology

If 2020 has confirmed anything, it’s that businesses today can’t operate in silos. Their relationships with customers, partners and suppliers need to be built on a strong foundation of collaboration. B2B collaboration refers to a network of organizations working together to plan and execute operations and meet shared objectives like improved efficiency, cost reduction, product innovation and customer service improvement. B2B collaboration solutions simplify the connectivity between people, systems and data that are managing an increasingly complex, multi-enterprise ecosystem overrun with disparate systems, processes and tools. These enterprise-grade solutions are critical to the success of any business. They are usually supported by strong, experienced development teams that adopt industry-leading deployment tools to ensure reliability and scalability of their deployments.

As enterprises shift to drive more operational efficiencies, reduce their infrastructure footprint and attempt to provide always-on and scalable B2B platforms, advancements in cloud technologies are helping drive innovation and faster time to value. About a decade ago, everyone expected organizations to move to the cloud – with the assumption this meant a public cloud. Fast forward to today, most businesses still maintain significant on-premises environments with limited public cloud deployments. However, with enhanced support for hybrid cloud deployment models, industry experts maintain that it is only a matter of time before enterprises transition to the cloud.

What is a container?

Containers are an executable unit of software in which application code is packaged, along with its libraries and dependencies, in common ways so that it can be run anywhere, whether it be on desktop, traditional IT, or the cloud. Containers, which are used to package and partition parts of a solution, are helping drive cloud deployment and adoption.

Enterprises worldwide are taking advantage of containers technology to enable virtualization while deploying B2B collaboration solutions in one of the following ways:

◉ As an on-premises solution inside their firewall
◉ Onto a hosted (or public dedicated) cloud infrastructure
◉ In a hybrid fashion where the workloads and deployments are spread across multiple data centers or multi-cloud environments

Early movers to the cloud started by creating and managing their own containers to transition their on-premises software to the cloud. Some of these early movers took advantage of docker based deployments. As cloud adoption grew, organizations started leaning towards open platforms, that support flexible deployment and support across multiple cloud providers, thereby helping avoid vendor lock-in. One such widely used platform is the Red Hat® OpenShift® Container Platform. OpenShift helps you manage the lifecycle of developing, deploying, and managing container-based applications. It provides a hybrid cloud application platform for deploying new and existing applications on secure, scalable infrastructure resources with minimal configuration and management overhead.

Containers technology built on platforms like OpenShift, help enterprises to modernize their B2B collaboration applications by providing:

◉ Speed and agility for quick-paced development processes and deployment flexibility

◉ Significant savings in IT operational costs through containerized architecture models

◉ Incremental value from existing software investments while simultaneously accelerating innovation

IBM Certified Containers

You can run IBM Certified Containers on a different cloud service provider’s Kubernetes software, or on the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (RHOCP), an even simpler, more efficient way to deploy, manage and scale secure, enterprise-grade software across multiple environments.

IBM Certified Containers are available across all of the IBM B2B Collaboration solutions bringing together Red Hat-certified containers and streamlined deployment instructions for OpenShift. These containers, orchestrated on the OpenShift container platform, provide a secure, compliant, scalable enterprise-grade application. This lets you free up your valuable support resources to focus on the more important aspects of building innovative extensions to the core application, helping serve the needs of your customers. Thus, these containers not only help modernize and simplify your current implementation but also help build operational efficiencies and reduce infrastructure costs.

Source: ibm.com

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