Technology Record - Issue 22: Autumn 2021

V I EWPO I NT Succeeding with an automation-first mindset J AN AR ENDT S Z : C E L I GO Celigo’s integration platform-as-a-service accelerates the time to automation and provides users with the best practices to help them succeed T he Covid-19 pandemic has created urgency for enterprises across all industries to accel- erate their digital transformation efforts, increasing the adoption of cloud applications. Those that quickly presented solutions to adapt and drive rapid innovation are emerging from the pandemic as leaders in their markets. What is clear now is that organisations are evolving their digital technology, people and pro- cesses to set themselves apart from competitors. The increased adoption of cloud applications has also led to an increase in data silos, which can create fragmented business processes and a lack of visibility. To succeed, an automation-first mindset and approach should be adopted. Automation of business processes is a critical component of any strategy to achieve business scale and velocity. Everything an organisation does should be done looking for opportunities to automate. However, the automation of business processes can also be a series of challenging technical pro- jects for any organisation. Some of the most crit- ical business processes, such as quote-to-cash or order-to-cash, are complex, span multiple depart- ments through different business applications, and require multiple subject matter experts. To address this, many companies dedicate technical resources to work directly at the appli- cation programming interface level to connect these applications and automate getting the data into the right place. However, this becomes increasingly hard to scale, especially as the num- ber of applications and volume of data in the organisation increases exponentially. A better strategy to solve the integration problem at scale is to adopt a platform that allows companies to easily automate processes by standardising how applications are integrated and how business pro- cesses are automated. By providing essential func- tionality out of the box – such as guaranteed data delivery, error handling and datamonitoring – they remove technical hurdles in building integrations. To successfully execute an automation strategy, you need to empower everyone in the organi- sation with the ability to automate the business processes they are closest to. This is where Celigo excels as an integration platform– not only do you get a scalable platform with rich developer tools, but you also get a library of pre-built integration applications with embedded business logic that automate common business processes across popular applications. This massively accelerates the time to automation and provides users with the best practices they need to help them succeed. This is the best of all worlds, giving IT and part- ners all the developer tools and governance con- trol of systems in their organisations, while also enabling end users to solve for their needs. Jan Arendtsz is the founder and CEO of Celigo “Everything an organisation does should be done looking for opportunities to automate” 79