Last week we had the opportunity to connect with so many Sage and Sage Intacct partners. It was amazing to be back in person connecting and engaging. It was a surreal experience and for a moment we forgot that the past two years didn’t happen. However, those years did happen and in a lot of ways, we are in a better more digitally advanced place because of it.
In a 2021 report from Palo Alto Networks, they found that the COVID-19 pandemic affected cloud adoption strategies for nearly every organization. According to their survey, organizations moved quickly to respond to increased cloud demands: nearly 70% of organizations are now hosting more than half of their workloads in the cloud, and overall cloud adoption has grown by 25% in the past year.
For organizations that didn’t plan to adopt digital transformation at this speed, it might have left you (or your clients) a little shell-shocked trying to integrate with so many different systems and applications. For a lot of us, we have avoided the topic of integration for so long because it seems “hard” and “expensive.”
While at the Sage Partner Summit, we saw many new and familiar faces. DataBlend is a fast-growing startup, so many of us have joined during the pandemic. Some of us came from other technology companies. Some came from other Sage Intacct Partners. And some came from Sage Intacct. So naturally, there was a lot to catch up on at the Sage Partner Summit!
Integration IS easy AND affordable.
One of the biggest takeaways that the entire DataBlend team had at the Sage Partner Summit was the overwhelming response to the notion that integration (i.e., iPaaS) can be easy and affordable. Integration gets a bad rap sometimes. Many think that it is expensive, complicated, and a long-drawn-out implementation process, thus why they have completely avoided the topic of integration.
We’ve been making a conscious effort to empower finance and accounting with the ability to take control of their tech stack. We want to demystify what it means to automate and integrate. Since so many of the people that we spoke weren’t familiar with the term “iPaaS” we thought a first step would be the break down some of the terminology we take for granted.
DataBlend’s Quick Guide to iPaaS:
A quick glossary of terms.
iPaaS:
iPaaS stands for integration Platform-as-a-Service. At its core, iPaaS is subscription, cloud-based software that facilitates the seamless movement of data across applications. It allows companies to collect, transform, and upload data across both cloud and on-premises/hosted applications. The beauty of iPaaS is that you can build, manage, and support all your integrations through a common platform. This eliminates managing multiple integrations through a variety of methods and user interfaces. It also can help streamline technical support and issue resolution as all the integrations are managed through a single platform.
DataBlend’s iPaaS solution is special because it was built BY finance people FOR finance people. We know exactly what YOU need and how to make it EASY enough that you don’t need IT to implement it. In most cases, we can have you up and running in a matter of weeks, not months.
SFTP:
SFTP, or Secure File Transfer Protocol, is a secure file transfer protocol that uses secure shell encryption to provide a high level of security for sending and receiving file transfers. Here’s a fun fact, you can connect to most applications and systems through SFTP – even if there isn’t a native integration built for it. So, if you have looked for an out-of-the-box integration and didn’t find it, or if it doesn’t work exactly like you want, DataBlend can help bridge the gap between despair and success.
ETL:
ETL stands for extract, transform and load. It is a data integration process that combines data from multiple data sources into a single, consistent data store that is loaded into a data warehouse or other target system.
Final Thoughts on the Sage Partner Summit
We are walking away from last week with an amazing sense of community. The one thing that has remained consistent through the years AND was felt during the Sage Partner Summit is a true sense of community. For many of us, it all started with Intacct and then with the transition to Sage Intacct and now Sage, Sage and legacy Intacct folks have done a remarkable job of keeping that together. There is a true feeling of connection – and that is true whether people compete with or complement each other. Not such an easy accomplishment in the world we live in today. For that, we are grateful to be a part of what Sage has created.
If you would like to learn more about DataBlend and have an integration challenge that you think is too hard to solve, we encourage you to participate in our Integration challenge. Click here to learn more.