In business, sports and life you will always be successful  if you choose to take the “high” road.  In real life that means, “do the right thing and don’t sink to low behavior even if your enemies do”.  Now, I’m not going to get into detail because I am not a licensed social worker, but suffice it to say, it’s a good rule to live by.  I am however, going to talk about the other kind of “Hy” road and that is the road to  “Hybrid B2B Integration”.  Hybrid B2B integration is composed of a combination of B2B software and B2B services that companies use to do business with their external trading partners – for example, order to cash or procure-to-pay processes.  B2B services can be anything from SaaS based applications, on-demand B2B infrastructure platforms all the way to B2B Outsourcing, which can include daily business activity monitoring, trading partner on-boarding, round the clock support desk, and dedicated program management.   

The Hybrid model is a great way to control what you feel is mission critical and outsource what you feel is either too time consuming, expensive, or difficult to do yourself.  Hybrid also enables you to leverage existing IT investments such  as ERP and EAI implementations and extend them into the B2B supply chain utilizing new or improved IT capabilities offered by Outsourcing vendors.   For example, last year GXS introduced its advanced Trading Grid Integration module called the “Shared Message Gateway” (SMG).  SMG enables companies to choose from over 20 communications protocols and over 20 ERP adapters for seamless trading partner and back-office integration for a true multi-enterprise architecture. 

The hybrid model enables much greater efficiency in running mature enterprise applications while taking advantage of a new generation of Internet-based technology. A McKinsey Quarterly report stated,  “In the past, CIOs deployed their own self-contained application architectures on their own servers and storage systems. This old model is giving way to a hybrid application architecture that combines hosted functionality with in-house applications running on consolidated and virtualized commodity servers. We believe that this transformation will drive efficiencies across the full stack, from business processes to physical infrastructure, while increasing IT’s ability to meet new demands in a rapidly changing business environment. Hybrid not only frees up capital and achieves cost savings, but it enhances flexibility, streamlines installation and upgrades and companies don’t have to maintain special skills.” 

If you still aren’t a believer, Gartner published a research report stating that “although most companies will implement some of their own B2B infrastructure, most midsize-to large companies will take a hybrid approach by deploying and operating their own B2B infrastructure to directly connect to some external business partners, while leveraging an external service provider to manage at least some of their B2B infrastructure.” 

When you are evaluating your next generation B2B architecture and strategy and you are asking yourself, “should we outsource, or do it in house?”, don’t go insane by thinking it’s an all or nothing proposition.  The answer is, it is a combination of both.   Determine your core competency, your opportunity costs of doing it yourself, your budget and time requirements.  Then when you meet with B2B vendors ask, “are you more like McDonalds or Burger King?”  They will probably look at you funny.  Then ask it this way, “can I have it my way?”  If they say no,  tell them to take the highway!