The Inovis Blog

Happy Fourth of July!

Meg Suggs — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:20:29 +0000

Fireworks, family, picnics, watermelon, lemonade, summer and sparklers can only mean one thing: the 4th of July is here again. From all of us here at Inovis, have a happy and safe holiday!

Who’s hitting the pavement for the Inovis Education Services Roadshow?

Robert Cannon — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:28:13 +0000

While this year’s Inovis Education Services Roadshow will be held close to the home of Inovis in Alpharetta, Georgia, professionals from all over the country are traveling cross country for this year’s three day event. From neighboring Southern states such as Alabama and Florida, to the Northern states of Ohio and Missouri, all the way out west in Washington and Oregon, and even from our very northern neighbor Canada, our educational gathering is proving to be a national affair.

From July 20 – 22, Inovis Educational professionals will be hosting workshops on a variety of topics such as cutting edge industry trends in areas like EDI, XML, and EDIFACT, tips and tricks on Inovis solutions, and valuable insights into how to effectively manage your company’s e-commerce efforts. Also on the agenda will be a cookout at the Marriott pool where attendees will have the chance to catch up with various Inovis professionals. With people flying in from all over the country (and Canada) , the mixer is sure to be beneficial, fun, and the ultimate in networking.

If you’d like to be a part of the 2009 Inovis Education Services Roadshow, you can still register here.

The Heritages of MFT Part 2

johntinovis — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 21:20:24 +0000

In my first blog post, I discussed the different heritages of Managed File Transfer and what each perspective teaches us about file transfer requirements. But I skipped over the new kid on the block: managed file transfer through email. A couple of years ago, I read a survey asking corporate IT people what they used for file transfer. The most common answer was that they e-mailed files. From personal observation, you could see this same behavior at home as well as in the office.

But now files, both business and personal, have grown much larger and much faster than my e‑mail inbox (at work, my inbox is actually smaller and more strictly managed than it was two years ago). There was already a security concern for e-mailing files around since e-mails are more like postcards than letters in envelopes and anybody on the Internet who sees the letter fly by can read it. But we continued to use e-mail anyway so long as it continued to work, mainly because it was just so darned easy. So now we have gotten to the point where e-mail doesn’t work so well for file transfer, and while this makes the security guys happy, what are the rest of us supposed to do?

Image Source: http://www.library.illinois.edu

Enter another set of Managed File Transfer solutions to the rescue, mostly in a category we can call E-Mail Attachment Management. These solutions are either plug-ins to e-mail clients that send your attachments through the web and send your e-mail through the e-mail system, or may be a little website where you can post a file and receive in return a link to paste into your e-mail or instant messenger client. Like the heritages of Managed File Transfer that I discussed in my first post, this evolution of file transfer solutions for e-mail also teaches us something important about Managed File Transfer.

The lesson is this: MFT principles apply to people participating in an unstructured business process as much as to applications and systems exchanging files as part of a highly structured and controlled process. In my previous post, the heritage solutions grew out of a set of problems related to interconnecting systems, but e-mail grew up connecting people and probably still reigns as the king of collaborative technologies. But people are people, so the “simple” process of moving a file between two people is actually much more complicated than it seems. I think this is part of what John W. Thompson was getting at in his RSA 2007 Keynote (is it already two years ago?) when he said “people are the new perimeter.”

I like to think of an MFT transaction as having a life-cycle governed by a mini-workflow. Even a simple connection might have loops and timers for renaming files after transmission, short-term archiving, and retransmission. But when people get involved, all the best practices and governance applied to e-mail systems is understood to apply to file transfer as well: scanning for PCI or HIPAA-related content, virus scanning, interfacing with long-term archiving and e-Discovery systems, variable retention periods, controls on encryption, and so on. We don’t necessarily know what the structure of the business process context is so we have to make some guesses. It’s much more heuristic and the security problems are thornier.

So you can’t get away with thinking only of how to transfer files; you need to contemplate the entire business process, collaborative or structured, with a clear understanding of the broader set of policies that apply to it, and then adopt a file transfer solution that best accommodates this process.

Question of the Week

Meg Suggs — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 18:15:03 +0000

Image Source: http://sehlhorst.smugmug.com

Today’s question is in regards to the common issues most B2B businesses face. Our blog B2B in Context was created to address the issues we hear the most often from our customers. We’re always looking to improve and expand our posts. To help us develop future articles, we’d like to ask you:

What are some of the B2B issues that are driving your company crazy?

Reader Feedback – Blurring the Lines Between SaaS and Outsourcing

edmagdich — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 19:03:09 +0000

Image Source: http://ceoworld.biz

As the Director of Product Management for Inovis’s outsourcing services line, I cover the full range of outsourcing services including the base level SaaS offering all the way up to the top tier true B2B outsourcing offering.

Although there are overlaps in these unique delivery models, there are definitely differences in the complexity of the products and how they are delivered to the client. At the lowest end, you are outsourcing your applications and infrastructure through a Software as a Service offering. This implies that your SaaS provider is going to have less involvement in the day-to-day operations of managing your business community and add very little, if any, insight into your business processes.

In contrast at the other end of the spectrum, your B2B Outsourcing partner becomes a highly integrated part of your B2B support chain. Your “vendor” becomes a valuable part of your team, bridging the gap between your IT staff and your business users. By integrating with your business, your partner offers the highest level of support across a variety of business processes and technological needs, while adding the expertise to implement best practices and efficiencies tailored to your B2B projects.

In the middle tier you will find a hybrid model of a SaaS offering with value added services offered at Ad Hoc or menu item prices.

In the grand scheme of outsourcing there are many different flavors and features that can be provided to meet a customer’s needs. Because we are experts in providing solutions that cover the full range of outsourcing, and our services are based on products and expertise that are offered at every level of outsourcing, I often see these solutions as a continuous spectrum of increasing value and integration in your customer’s business. I also believe that a SaaS customer can become a Business Process Outsourcing customer with the right level of executive sponsorship and solutioning to that customer’s business needs.

However, I am interested in your view points. Does the general market see SaaS and BPO as two ends of the same product spectrum, or are these truly different products with little overlap in purpose and potential customer base? Is your SaaS opportunity today looking for a comparison of SaaS and full service outsourcing? Are they your potential BPO customer in the future?

Sam is the Man!

Meg Suggs — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 17:57:50 +0000

Today we are pleased to announced that Sam Presutti, Senior Solutions Architect here at Inovis, has been elected to the Board of Directors of Data Interchange Standards Association (DISA). DISA helps organizations simplify transactions, lower costs and expand markets by developing and maintaining business-to-business (B2B) standards for electronic trade and commerce. Sam’s experience includes 33 years of B2B technology management, with a focus on building E-Commerce Gateway solutions for EDI, XML and EDIFACT messaging and for E-Commerce Gateway security integrated into client-oriented business functions. Sam will be joining President and CEO of Inovis Seam Feeney, who is a current member of the DISA board.

If you’d like to learn more about DISA, here are a few quick facts:

DISA serves as the Secretariat for the Accredited Standards Committee X12 (ASC X12), a developer of electronic data interchange (EDI) standards and related documents for national and global markets, chartered by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) in 1979.

DISA develops and maintains over 315 X12 EDI standards and a growing collection of X12 XML schemas.

View Inovis Press releases here.

The Heritages of MFT

Meg Suggs — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 15:54:10 +0000

Here is the first official post on the Inovis blog from John Thielens, Vice President of Product Marketing and company guru of Managed File Transfer.

Managed File Transfer is getting a lot of attention these days as companies wrestle with security, compliance, capacity, and reliability issues around their data movement strategies. But what exactly is Managed File Transfer anyway? To a certain extent, that depends on your historical perspective. When looking at the history of Managed File Transfer, it is important to remember that MFT has several different heritages, and that each heritage comes with a particular bias, perhaps, but also a particular set of lessons. Let me explain.

Here at Inovis, we are best known for our VAN/EDI heritage, and the VAN/EDI heritage teaches that SLA’s are important, that Visibility and Tracking are important, that understanding the business process context of why you’re moving data around is important, and that understanding the file itself and being able to match the confirmation to an order is important. This leg of heritage is a very transactional, measurable perspective because VANs serve this particular function.

In contrast, a version of MFT that stems from FTP or Secure FTP provides a very different set of lessons because the purpose of purchasing an MFT tool kit instead of just using FTP is usually for security reasons. Therefore, the focus is on security and compliance. The lessons learned with this version of MFT are about service and authentication technologies as they tend to be authentication centric and not peer-to-peer. One of the inherent benefits of operating an FTP server or an MFT server that comes from this particular flavor of MFT is that people have to connect to you and log in, so you can therefore impose the security policies and manage their credentials. Banks like this aspect of MFT and have traditionally operated this way. There is a lot of real secure file transfer heritage in that side, and from the Secure File Transfer market we’ve come to understand that security is but one aspect of management.

Inverting the bank’s perspective where the bank is always the server in charge and everyone else is always the client leads to the third important heritage of Managed File Transfer that I like to call spoke-itis—always the spoke and never the hub. This means that initially you were dealing with lots of different rules to talk to your hubs and maybe it was proprietary software you had to use, but usually as you scale up, you wind up scripting it. You may have a Unix administrator or a Windows guru or perhaps a programmer that will script the interactions with all of these environments, and you consequently develop your own mini hub. There’s a very flexible scriptability and lots of adaptability in dealing with all of the rules imposed by the hub. It also means that there are other aspects of security that you need to worry about because you are managing credentials from the other side. When you’re the server, you keep public keys and password hashes, but when you’re the client, you keep private keys and passwords. Security is different but equally important with this kind of interaction. The real lesson, truly, from this leg of heritage is that file transfer isn’t really just about moving the files. Managed File Transfer is about integration and about making a business process work with someone on the other side. Part of this is moving the file, but most of this is how you manage the credential, what you do before and after you move the file, whether you have to rename it, whether you have to get them something minutes later, and the rules around doing that. What you’re really attempting is executing some kind of a business interaction profile. You’re not JUST trying to do file transfer.

When looking at all of these different breeds of Managed File Transfer, we come to see that Managed File Transfer as a category is actually incredibly broad. Gartner poses a statistic that 80% of the data that binds businesses together is files, and that includes both those collaborative human files as well as the structural and application files. When you’re looking at MFT solutions today, you can’t choose a product or a solution that has a particular heritage; that’s not going to do it for you. The challenge to us as vendors is to give equal weight to all of the requirements, and all of the use cases that derive from all of those important heritages. For the purchaser, the obligation is to look for solutions that meet those needs and to demand that kind of completeness. In my opinion, the way that’s going to happen initially is not that we’re ever going to build the mega product that does all things to all people. Instead, what’s going to happen is we’re going to focus on the M part of MFT and have management and visibility solutions that are at least able to instrument what’s happening around the different aspects of that 80% glue. Start with a holistic view of what MFT means and how to manage it. Instead of trying to find some mega product that addresses possible use cases, look instead for openness, standards, and interoperability. Even your e-mail system is technically part of the MFT infrastructure and you most likely aren’t going to buy e-mail and EDI from the same guy. Do, however, consider what they’re doing to manage your perspective, especially with regards to visibility and your process of securing that Managed File infrastructure.

Question of the Week

Meg Suggs — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 20:52:54 +0000

Image Source: http://www.dailygreen.com

There are tons of great webcasts out there on various subjects to help you fine tune your business. Today, we’d like to know about your experience with webinars. What is the best webcast you’ve attended this year? What made it so fantastic?

Ask Erik about Agile

Meg Suggs — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 19:47:53 +0000

On Thursday June 18, 2009, Inovis CTO Erik Huddleston will be hosting the Agile Austin Ask an Expert session.

Since Erik’s entrance into the company from the acquisition of BetweenMarkets, Erik has guided the vision for Inovis products and services and changed the name of the game with the implementation of Scrum. Rather than transitioning with a team-by-team rollout, Erik lead the company full force with an “all-in” approach to rolling out Scrum.

Those interested in attending the June 18^th seminar can read more about the event here.

Regain Visibility and Control

Jessie Hodges — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 13:38:01 +0000

While visibility into key business processes is critical, many organizations do not easily obtain answers to simple questions like, “Where is my order?”

If your supply chain has become increasingly complex in recent years and you are looking for ways to regain visibility and control over its multi-enterprise processes, watch this short Order Visibility demo.

Click here to view the Order Visibility demo.