Cleo unveiled CIC Studio, an integration development and design environment for Cleo Integration Cloud. This latest addition to Cleo's platform provides hands-on control over how organizations design, build, and optimize complex end-to-end business processes and integration flows, all in one place.

In today's digital era, companies require greater agility to remain competitive, deliver on elevated customer expectations, and drive revenue growth. The market is unforgiving to those who have slow partner onboarding, inefficient business processes, or delays in doing business in new digital channels, such as e-commerce stores or online marketplaces.

The key to combatting these challenges is to empower technical teams to have hands-on integration control - giving them the capability to quickly respond to customer needs and adapt to changing market requirements. In a recent survey¹, 84% of organizations said that having a flexible integration platform is the most important capability for successful integration initiatives. Yet, in the same survey, nearly 40% of organizations claimed their inflexible integration infrastructure most impedes revenue.

Cleo's new CIC Studio closes that gap.

CIC Studio's low-code development experience provides companies a more efficient way to create, enhance, and publish B2B integrations with their ecosystems, be they new-age API-based integrations or traditional EDI. Users can also take advantage of pre-defined templates and a vast library of pre-built CIC Connectors for API-based SaaS and on-premise integration to jumpstart their integration projects. When used with the CIC Engine, Cleo's proven any-to-any data transformation powerhouse, integration teams unlock flexibility to support virtually any end-to-end business-process integration use case, such as order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, load-tender-to-invoice and the like.

CIC Studio completely redefines the user experience by combining modern cloud technology with a rich toolset for API-based, EDI-based, and file-based integration - all on the same centralized platform. The result is greater integration confidence thanks to the ability to efficiently tackle designing and building integrations with speed.

"The key to thriving in any market environment is having organizational agility to deliver superb customer experiences," said Vidya Chadaga, vice president of Products at Cleo. "Having integration control at your fingertips, through self-service and end-to-end visibility, means everything can be done at higher velocity - faster trading partner onboarding, acceleration of new sales channels, and quicker business outcomes."

Providing an environment with a deep and powerful set of self-service integration capabilities is becoming table stakes for supply chain agility and day-to-day B2B operations in order to respond to rapidly increasing customer expectations for seamless experiences. Having flexibility and control is critical for managing exceptions, meeting service level agreements (SLAs), and resolving errors from digital business transactions with ecosystems - all of which impact the customer experience.

"Agility is synonymous with sustainable success in the age of digital ecosystems, and we rely on Cleo for highly adaptive integrations that speed our innovation," said Ed Krupka, CIO at Burris Logistics. "CIC Studio helps us get closer to our customers and partners because their world changes so quickly that our business processes must be primed to accommodate them."

Organizations have often turned to "old-school" integration outsourcing firms or networks because of the promise of compliance and offloading of "non-core" integration activities. Yet, over the past decade organizations have learned that these integrations are critical to driving revenue in a digital-first economy. Integration teams have grown frustrated, realizing they need real-time control and visibility over their integration flows. Thriving in today's market environment calls for a new approach where organizations have self-service control over their API and EDI integrations on a single platform.

With CIC Studio, users not only gain this control, but they can rest assured because the integration platform is backed by Cleo's Services and Support teams. This gives them the choice of leveraging external expertise if and when needed, without relying on them for every integration operation - completely maximizing organizational agility.

"Organizations have been handcuffed between the hard choice of owning their integrations themselves or completely outsourcing - with nothing in between," said John Santaferraro, Research Director, EMA. "This means businesses have to choose between hiring the technical expertise to manually manage complex integrations, or entirely forego control of their systems, both of which have several downsides. A hybrid approach with both control over key revenue-driving business processes and the support of managed services is what's needed for an effective integration strategy."