Adeptia announce Adeptia Connect

Adeptia have announced the release Adeptia Connect. This is cloud application runs on Amazon Web Services, designed for business users to create data connections with customers and partners. Adeptia claim that anyone in an organisation can create data connections, whilst IT are still able to maintain visibility and control on the backend to ensure security.

In an article to accompany the launch by Ben Kepes of Forbes, he states these 2 facts:

1. Organisations are increasingly using a diverse range of cloud-based applications. E-commerce, accounting, CRM, file sharing and other back-office solutions are increasingly taking the place of big-box monolithic suites.
2. Integrating discrete technology solutions is just too hard. It often requires programming skills, expensive technology solutions and tends to be static.

In Adeptia Connect, companies publish their connectivity profiles, which are called Adapters. An Adapter is similar to a Facebook or LinkedIn profile. Each Adapter is for a specific type of data that a company wants to receive or send, such as invoices, orders, inventory information, shipping information, leads, contacts, contracts, etc. There can be 4 types of adapters – File In, File Out, API and Form.

The software comes with a number of pre-built adapters for popular cloud applications such as Salesforce, NetSuite, MS Dynamics CRM, QuickBooks, SharePoint, JMS, Dropbox, Google Drive, Web Service Consumer (API), Google Apps, LDAP, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, Google Spreadsheets, OFX, and RSS Feeds.

In the cloud there is a directory of adapters that organisations using Adeptia Connect have published. Partners of the organisations can search this directory and find the necessary adapter to connect to exchange information.

There is a dashboard which gives real-time access to the information that is being exchanged for an organisation and also shows the historical logs and history of what data has been processed. This provides a mechanism to verify that data was correctly delivered or if there were any problems or errors. There is also a Message Center that keeps track of all the administrative messages, invites and approvals that are sent between users in an organisation and external organisations.

Data mapping is done through a visual, web-based, drag-and-drop, any-to-any mechanism. Data mapping rules are given in English, rather than in code. It also provides a test function to confirm the correctness of the mapping rules before they are saved.

There is a built-in scheduler, so that jobs can be automatically run at certain times or after certain intervals. Adeptia also supports real-time and polling events which allow data transfers to be run when certain events occur such as a new file being available, or a record being updated in an application.

Adeptia Connect is a useful addition to Adeptia’s Integration Suite, but I can see many organisations who are not existing Adeptia customers being interested in testing out its capabilities. The wide range of pre-built connections to cloud-based applications is very sensible as well as being very attractive. Depending on the cost, Adeptia Connect looks like it would be of great use to SMEs in their dealing with large enterprise customers.