Mayer Electric Supply, Birmingham, Ala., has become one of the first companies to implement the new WebSpan cloud-based integration platform developed by Hubspan and IBM. The service gives Mayer the ability to provide its customers with seamless integration to its online catalog and e-procurement services using services hosted and managed on the Internet “cloud” by Seattle-based Hubspan.
The move to cloud computing was the best option to avoid the cost and headaches of developing home-grown solutions for all the large industrial customers that wanted to be able to move data from Mayer’s e-commerce system to the customer’s enterprise system to create and approve a purchase order and then back to Mayer’s system to place the order (known as punch-in and punch-out), said Barry Carden, Mayer Electric Supply’s vice president and chief information officer.
“We spent about $70,000 trying to do punch-out ourselves. It never worked correctly, and it was a headache from the word ‘go’,” Carden said. “Then when we wanted to add another customer, we were looking at several thousand more for another consultant.” A key part of the difficulty came in integrating with the wide variety of systems the customers use.
Mayer’s in-house information technology crew of 14 people was already very busy managing Mayer’s systems across the company’s 57 locations. “It’s hard to have people with specialties in all areas. We didn’t want to invest in additional resources to do that,” Carden said.
With the cloud-based system, Mayer only has to maintain a catalog for each customer. Hubspan acts as the middleman, taking information from the customer, integrating into Mayer’s catalog for that customer. Hubspan handles the punch-out procedures and provides the ability for any system to work with any system. “That’s their purpose in life,” Carden said.
Many potential users express concerns about the security and reliability of using cloud-based systems, concerns that Carden shares, but that wasn’t really a problem in this case, because none of Mayer’s data is hosted in the cloud — Mayer’s data remains behind its own firewall, said Carden.
“If they were hosting my data, I’d have big concerns,” he said. “There’s the issue with what happens when their hardware goes down? You lose a whole bunch of control with cloud computing, and I’d have a lot of concerns. But since I don’t have any data hosted out on the cloud, I don’t have any security concerns. It depends what you’re doing in the cloud.”