Ascarii CEO describes the benefits of adding BPA Platform to the company’s product portfolio
Codeless Platforms and Ascarii recently signed a strategic partnership agreement, with Ascarii adding BPA Platform to its product portfolio, and Codeless Platforms developing two exclusive products, BPA Cloud and BPA Pro, for Ascarii’s global Cloud4Partners™ service.
Ascarii is now using BPA Platform for a wide-range of SAP Business One projects. Some are relatively standard, such as Magento integration, but it is also using it as an integration tool for some of its bigger, more complex clients that have multiple sites.
“You can go from one extreme to the other with BPA Platform. It can do simple, off the shelf connections, all the way to the extreme where we are actually taking all the stabilisers off and using it to its max,” explained Stuart Wilson, CEO, Ascarii. “For example, we’re building an integration project for a client that consists of 27 disparate systems. BPA Platform is essentially going to be an ESB (Enterprise Service Bus), which makes a lot more sense in the modern, digital age.”
“When we are talking about SAP Business One at the digital core, and you’ve got all of these systems, external companies, head offices or subsidiaries dotted around the periphery, you need a standardised way of integrating from your digital core out to an infinite number of endpoints. The world is fully connected now. Every single software system is connected in some way or another and you need a connector to connect one to the other; and that’s basically what BPA Platform is. It’s a toolkit of connectors. It’s almost like a universal plug. With some slight modification, you can tailor the end bit to fit virtually any other system.”
It’s this flexibility that attracted Ascarii to BPA Platform in the first place, and continues to impress the company.
“BPA Platform is highly flexible, but also simplistic, which has to be the way for solutions these days. If it’s not simple, forget it. It’s not a derogatory term. Some might think if it’s simple, it’s cheap and easy to create. That’s not the point. With BPA Platform all the innovation, investment and complexity is tucked away. It’s the user interface and usability that’s simple, not the system itself. Essentially, it’s a highly complex system which has been made simple.”
The benefits to Ascarii’s customers
The true selling point of BPA Platform has always been its ability to improve efficiencies, cut costs and increase revenue for any business that implements it, and it’s something that Ascarii is always keen to point out to potential or existing customers.
“There’s always an ROI for the things that we do – it’s tangible. We’re talking about saving days, not hours, on a monthly basis. It’s not a case of a little bit of change. It’s money that that gets the CFO’s attention. That’s the main thing. It actually gets the attention of the finance department,” said Wilson.
“Whenever we are discussing a project we always run a simplistic ROI ‘what if?’ scenario: manual processes versus integration. For example, a customer maybe doing something manually which takes an employee one day per month. However, if they select the relevant BPA Platform connector, which takes two days to set up, then there is no need for an employee to be involved afterwards, as it is all automated. For this scenario, the customer is typically looking at about a six month ROI on just that one connector. Once a customer understands this they usually just pay straight away. Then, the next time we mention we are going to use BPA Platform for a project they are usually more than happy as they’ve already seen what it can do and the cost savings they have made. BPA Platform is becoming synonymous with cost savings for a lot of customers.”
Exploiting Codeless Platforms’ portal software
Another aspect that has excited Ascarii is the potential of Codeless Platforms’ portals offering, which is built upon Applications Platform, Codeless Platforms’ rapid application development software.
“We think there’s a huge market for customer portals. That’s the next big thing for us. Again, we are working collaboratively on this with Codeless Platforms as we can add referenceability and more importantly, sponsorship. Between us, we can therefore develop exactly what SAP Business One customers are looking for. Any portals we develop will be available via the Cloud4Partners™ marketplace and subsequently hosted on our cloud platform. We are basically going to have a portals stack inside our environment, alongside the BPA offering.”
Download the full partner focus below to read more about how BPA Platform is helping Ascarii.
