Consolidating The Giant B2B Data Universe

Manufacturers, distributors and top healthcare organizations have run into one giant problem – having to take something as giant and seemingly infinite as the “data universe” and shrinking the scope of it. PYMNTS sat down with Kore Technologies’ Keith Lambert, VP of Marketing and Business Development, and Ken Dickinson, Co-Founder and Managing Partner to get the scoop on how Kore’s tools do exactly that – and aim to bring together accurate, clean data in useful repository for ultimately better analytics.

 

Manufacturers, distributors and top health care organizations have run into one giant problem – having to take something as giant and seemingly infinite as the “data universe” and shrinking the scope of it. PYMNTS sat down with Kore Technologies’ Keith Lambert, VP of Marketing and Business Development, and Ken Dickinson, Co-Founder and Managing Partner, to get the scoop on how Kore’s tools do exactly that – and aim to bring together accurate, clean data in useful repository for ultimately better analytics.

 

First of all, Keith and Ken, can you talk a little bit more about the Kourier Integrator product, and your take on enterprise data management. Who are you guys disturbing and what the product is accomplishing in the ecosystem?

KD: Primarily we work with manufacturers, distributors, higher education and the healthcare industry. We’re particularly confident with the UniVerse and the UniData database environment. The challenge we see is getting data out of that database is difficult – we have a tool called Kourier Integrator that can extract that data and move it out to a data warehouse. We’re finding that a lot of companies have more than just the UniVerse/UniData type environment. We’ve therefore expanded Kourier so we can pull in data and aggregate that data from multiple sources, such as ORACLE, ACCESS, and SQL Server and consolidate those data sources for better analytics and business intelligence reporting.

KL: To add to that, traditionally, Kourier Integrator has been used in an extract transform load capacity. In recent releases, we’ve added the ability to do integration from systems to other systems – we call that enterprise application integration. We’re able to take data from, for example, CRM systems and pull that into other MultiValue systems – we can do inbound and outbound integration now. The newer releases provide a lot of additional functionalities.

 

Can you give an off the cuff example of how that data would be used in a business intelligence reporting role, the types of decisions that an executive group might require for the data Kourier pulls and analyzes?

KL: The typical use is to build executive dashboards and really understanding the customers – that’s who’s buying, where are they buying from, their habits. Often times, there is a plethora of different reporting tools out there, and our Kourier is agnostic to these tools. The main problem we’re solving is getting clean, accurate data and into a repository from which they can report on.

 

Purchasing habits leads us to the eCommerce suite that you have out. What does that suite entail? 

KD: First, I want to point out that KommerceServer is a standalone eCommerce platform that helps businesses serve their customers better. It does come with a storefront and a customer portal, and it has an API that can be integrated to the back office ERP. What we do for our customers is use our Kourier Integrator solution to integrate their ERP system to the eCommerce solution.

One of the challenges that our customers in eCommerce have is managing several data sources – the products they’re trying to sell might come from different places. Bringing that all in, we use Kourier to grab that data from multiple sources and centralize it. What comes with KommerceServer is a product information management system so they can put rich content out on the website. Our customers are not the ones that are authoring that content – it comes directly from the manufacturer.

 

You mentioned a couple of new areas where you’re onboarding clients. Can you talk a little about these?

KD: For eCommerce, we focus on manufacturing and distributing. A traditional model is reliant on a brick and mortar type of strategy. What we’ve seen is a lot more online vendors taking part of that market share and it’s also becoming much easier to ship products. Manufacturers who usually protect the sales channels and sell to the distributors exclusively have started to sell to big players like Amazon.

There have really become thin margins for distributors – and it’s a price war out there. We want the website to be more complementary to a brick and mortar, where a lot of times the distributor feels online is a threat to their business. We want to make it easier to use the web to drive traffic to the stores using our eCommerce platform. The distributors can have loyalty programs, coupons – we try to blend in the B2C experience for B2B.

Online business is going up and brick and mortar is going down – we want to find the intersection between the two worlds.

 

 

Where do you see the space in 5 years, with products like these and the integration of online and brick and mortar?

KD: We’ll continue to see some attrition in the number of brick and mortar stores. We might see more stores like Apple and Microsoft where there are hands-on type environments. Although the brick and mortar-shopping trend is down sales are still way ahead of online. But companies will have to put more money into technology and less into brick and mortar, and take advantage of shipping options like drones.

One space won’t dominate the other entirely – there will be a point where they need to balance.

KL: On that hybrid nature, the audiences we’re serving span across generations. As businesses evolve, their employees evolve. The website they manage and maintain for their customers have to evolve as well. Writing software that makes it easier for them to use is really key these days. We’re trying to make software that works for all audiences.

There needs to be an omnichannel approach that supports both ways of buying depending on the mood, need or timing. We’re trying to develop websites that serve all of those audiences. It’s very B2B focused, but it has that B2C feel. We have a unique approach to the design of the software and the delivery and implementation of the whole solution.

 

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