Cleo's New CIC Agent Provides End-To-End Integration Visibility For Logistics

Forward-looking companies demand complete visibility into their mission-critical business processes from their technology experts. Yet many still struggle to integrate enterprise workflows with cloud environments without divesting traditional on-premise systems. To these companies and experts, today’s news from Cleo, the global leader in ecosystem integration solutions, should come as welcome relief.

CIC Agent, the newest innovation on the Cleo Integration Cloud platform, gives enterprises the ability to securely connect and integrate to on-premise systems, while providing configuration and control in the cloud – even when APIs do not exist. This in effect “lights up” end-to-end integration visibility across companies’ most critical business processes, such as order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, and load-tender-to-invoice. Result? With this newfound ability to enable seamless and secure dataflows from ground-to-cloud and cloud-to-ground, companies can now connect their entire ecosystem of trading partners and cloud applications to any on-premise system, ranging from custom applications to file servers. Now, businesses can gain immediate value by leveraging their past infrastructure investments, while being current on technology to ensure they can efficiently respond to the market’s evolving demands and competitive pressures.

“Cleo’s CIC Agent puts the spotlight where it is needed most -- on completing the ‘last mile’ of integration by embracing a hybrid IT landscape with SaaS and on-premise applications, and delivering visual confirmation that the data has reached it’s intended destination,” said Mahesh Rajasekharan, president and CEO of Cleo. “Now, not only do manufacturers, wholesalers, logistics businesses and others have the end-to-end integration visibility they need to confidently execute strategic cloud-first, cloud-next, or cloud-only initiatives, they know for certain they won’t disrupt the traditional systems they already rely on to run their business.”

Typical integration solutions cannot create end-to-end integrations because of their inability to directly connect to on-premise applications or homegrown ERPs – forcing organizations to live with visibility gaps or to swivel between systems. Files are often dropped onto a server for a backend system to consume through a script, scheduler, or manual process with no visibility about where the data was eventually consumed. A recent survey by Dimensional Research shows that two-thirds (63%) of enterprises today consider legacy applications their biggest integration challenge. And nearly half (45%) point to the difficulty of integrating with new applications as being their greatest impediment to revenue. (source: 2020 State of Ecosystem and Application Integration Report)

In response to this market need, Cleo’s CIC Agent provides secure integration between cloud and on-premise applications through a control and lifecycle-management interface provided in Cleo Integration Cloud. Organizations are now finally empowered to close visibility gaps and automate key business processes that touch on-premise systems, such as file servers, relational databases, or private cloud infrastructure where APIs do not exist, or where manual intervention is required.

“Many companies we work with today are challenged with their current on-premise systems. Their traditional or legacy systems are so customized and intricately interwoven into their business that upgrading the back-end application layer is a non-starter,” says Charles Abbott, CEO of The Persimmon Group, a systems integrator consulting firm based in Dallas, Texas. “Cleo’s CIC Agent provides a unique way to get the integration and visibility they need, without causing disruption to previous investments. Cleo is pushing the envelope for giving organizations true end-to-end integration capabilities with increased visibility. In today’s dynamic business climate, that is crucial to driving revenue and success.”

A recent Smarter With Gartner post quotes Kevin Matheny, Senior Director Analyst, Gartner, as saying, “The decentralized nature of the cloud becomes a challenge when you need to integrate applications, for example, to optimize business processes or gain real-time access to data across various systems and providers.” The post goes on to say that, “The key to success is to find the approach that maximizes the value delivered by each integration rather than trying to maximize the value of your investments in integration tools”.

Cleo’s new CIC Agent is a lightweight and headless piece of software designed to be deployed on a variety of on-premise enterprise systems giving the ability to:

- Move workloads to the cloud while supporting integration into existing on-premise systems via a control interface in the cloud
- Easily design and build integration flows between ecosystems of trading partners and applications
- Enable visibility across complex, end-to-end business processes such as order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, and load-tender-to-invoice, which rely on back-office system integration
- Support integration in situations where APIs don’t exist (e.g., lift and shift file server to a virtualized private cloud environment)
- Remotely configure and control integration between Cleo Integration Cloud, private cloud, and on-premise file servers and databases