It was such a pleasure to meet with so many of our customers this month at our Axway North America Summit. We have much more to share about our takeaways from the events, but I wanted to give you a quick overview of what I was privileged to share during our main roadmap session.
Axway B2B’s mission is to power the transactional lifeblood of the world's largest trading ecosystems.
You see this reflected in the words of our customers: “Axway integration is at the heart of the digital transformation at Bosch,” says Rainer Metje, Vice President IT Products/Services Data & Integration Platforms at Bosch Digital.
We’ve seen lots of turbulence and uncertainty in the B2B space recently, and we want to assure our customers that B2B is core to our business here at Axway. We continue to invest in it and take great pride in offering the most flexible B2B solution for modern-day requirements.
In a world where integration vendors face major security concerns and seem to be scattered in their focus, we’re seeing some fundamental shifts in the market – from vendors losing focus on B2B, to others becoming distracted by other areas of their business...we are finding that many customers are left confused and worried about the future viability of their B2B technology investments.
Then, there’s the reality that B2B integration has hit a “point of no return” in cloud growth.
B2B cloud integration has reached a tipping point
International Data Corporation (IDC) analysts predicted that B2B cloud integration would increase by close to 11% YoY, and the market hit a pivot point in 2023 where cloud overtook non-cloud market share. Cloud revenue has continued to accelerate its revenue growth and is set to almost triple by 2027.
As analysts confirm what we are witnessing for ourselves, we’ve designed our B2B integration roadmap to match pace with this growth and support our customers as they continue to shift to the cloud.
This is why you’ll see us investing more in containerization, for example, to allow customers to implement and manage the solution in the cloud more easily and in a more scalable way.
Here is how we are adapting our B2B Integration roadmap at Axway to keep ahead of an evolving market and continue to support our customers throughout it all. We have chosen to focus on three main strategic areas in 2024: security, modernization, and usability/UX.
Keeping a laser focus on security for B2B integration
Security remains a top priority for us at Axway, as we strive to provide the most secure platform for our customers to transact with their partner ecosystem. You’ll see this notably in the following enhancements to the platform:
- Elliptical Curve Cryptography (this is a requirement for AS4 that's coming up overseas)
- Deeper SSO support
- Enhanced SFTP Encryption
- TLS 1.3 support for various protocols
- Containerization
I add containerization to this list because it presents an opportunity for us to essentially rearchitect the software; as we're rewriting components within the software, resulting in a codebase this is inherently more secure along the way.
Continuing to modernize B2B integration with APIs, AI, value-added services, and containerization
We are continuing to develop more modern solutions to keep up with the modern complexity in B2B integration, exploring new technologies like AI to see how they can improve the success of our B2B customers. These enhancements include:
More transactional APIs. We’ve been talking about API-enhanced B2B integration for a while now, so this is a continued push. Customers are most often asked to support API-centric integration channels where transactional APIs are especially useful, so we’ll continue to enhance this functionality.
Extended value-added services. These include Axway Business Network, a modern, API-enabled VAN service, our WebEDI Supplier Portal, and eInvoicing, all three of which were added in 2023. Value-added services include an API gateway, Track and Trace B2B platform for DSCSA compliance, and CSOS, an API-driven approach to DEA compliance.
This graphical representation shows more clearly how our investments in these services extend the capabilities of the Axway B2B Integration Platform.
Expanding architectural resiliency through containerization. This is a big piece of our modernization strategy because we want to make sure that the software can be delivered in a cloud-native, more modern architecture that supports your needs.
Some of our customers are being told by their own internal IT departments that they need to deploy on containers and move to Google Cloud or Azure or AWS… We want to be ready to support you and work with you to get there.
Leveraging artificial intelligence. In the short term, we’re modernizing things like our training and documentation with the help of AI to make it more consumable and digestible. Longer term, we're also looking at exploring other options that can build out additional value in the B2Bi product line.
Improving usability along with the B2Bi user interface
We want to ensure that our solution provides an experience that is reliable, while still being easy to use and maintain. In part, that means providing the means to automate things as much as possible.
Improved usability is about more than just a UI. It's also about building out and strengthening backend APIs for automation purposes, so that you can run the software how you see fit.
Some customers want to run B2Bi in a headless manner or plug it into their own applications or whatever they manage their normal business processes with. Extended APIs allow us to do this.
Usage and telemetry reporting. Customers need to be able to report on their own usage and potentially gain insights into that, but reporting also allows us at Axway to better prioritize the capabilities within the product.
We have a wide swath of protocols and standards that we support, but do we need to maintain them all, or are some not being used? We could deprecate those and focus our efforts on building out more valuable things in the future. Telemetry capabilities integrated into the solution help us all build a more strategic roadmap moving forward.
Ease of upgrade. This is something we've been working on especially since the 2.6 releases and the upgrades that exist today, but containerization should make it even easier to upgrade and get to a point where you can achieve zero-downtime objectives.
Artificial intelligence. We've created an AI task force on the R&D and an AI Center of Excellence in our R&D Leadership team. Aside from a few short-term wins I mentioned above, we hope to have some more exciting things to talk about in the longer term for the product roadmap in the long run.
Optimize business performance with the Axway B2B Integration platform
Whether you manage your B2B integrations yourself or let Axway manage your operations for you (as private SaaS powered by MS Azure or AWS, or in a Managed Services end-to-end approach), our platform experience approach offers iPaaS connectors, a consistent self-service user experience, and real-time visibility into your B2B integrations.
Axway offers decades of global B2B/EDI expertise, working today with nearly a thousand customers across a diverse mix of verticals and use cases. We mange hundreds of thousands of partner connections and process hundreds of millions of transactions daily.
Look at how Cencora, a leading global pharmaceutical solutions organization, relies on our B2B integration infrastructure to process over $140 billion in annual revenue.
“For that reason, it’s crucial that we can send and receive EDI messages 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” says Scott Marshall, Senior Director, IT Product Lead — EDI Technology at Cencora.
Axway B2B Integration gives you the expertise, scale, and flexibility that you can rely on for the future of your business.
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