Hi, everyone. Welcome to today's event, how Avid Property Group, one of Australia's largest and most trusted residential developers built a solid IT foundation on Tray.

So my name is Paul Turner with Tray.ai, your host for today's event. And so just gonna jump into the speakers we've got for you.

So, we got a straight up educational session planned for you today.

And, really, the whole goal of today's session is for you to walk away with new ways, to think about your integration and automation strategy. And so for today's speakers, I'm joined by Alex Wurm, at Nucleus Research.

Alex leads iPaaS Research, so integration platform as a service research and advisory.

And Alex is gonna share with you how to think about the economics of modernizing your integration technologies, so things to think about and how to plan for it and, how to look at your integration landscape you have and how to think about how to plan for the future.

And then gonna hand it over to Helen Comninos, general manager of business operations at Avid.

Helen has got experience across a wide range of industries, finance, technology, insurance, telecommunications, retail, property, government, over twenty five years experience, growing businesses across both Australia and South Africa.

And also joined by Carmen Glenister, enterprise architect at Avid Property Group.

Carmen has over thirty years of experience coordinating advice on how to accurately and cost effectively and efficiently bring new complex initiatives to fruition across a broad range of industries.

And, one of the things that on Carmen’s background here is that she's not an ivory tower architect. Right? So she's really about making complex problems simple. Right?

And really getting to a result, be more pragmatic and begin and really just meeting needs of the business. And then, obviously, once we run through Alex's presentation and, Avid, I'm gonna open up first some questions at the end. And so I think you're gonna get a lot of value out of hearing how Avid remodernized and all the different use cases that they built, on one platform. So with that, over to you, Alex.

Thanks, Paul. And thank you all for joining me to discuss the ROI delivered by modern iPaaS solutions and Tray. I had the pleasure of putting together an ROI analysis with Avid, with Carmen, and with Helen. And so my goal in this section is to really provide you with an understanding of how to think through value when it comes to integration platforms and integration solutions. We're gonna discuss the role that modern iPaaS solutions play in delivering this value and show you a little bit about what's going on in the market.

First, let me introduce you to my firm, Nucleus Research with a brief introduction.

We deliver value focused research based on actual customer deployments.

Since our founding in 2000, we have published over a thousand case studies exploring the financial returns of technology deployments.

We are accredited with the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy, and all of our ROI analyses follow the same standards as accounting professionals.

Our research is written from the perspective of a CFO focusing on the value of technology rather than its exact technical specifications and publishes directly to the Bloomberg terminal for our financial readership.

Now a brief overview of the research that we provide with the next slide.

Our primary reports involve ROI analyses of actual customer deployments like the one that we did with Avid, taking into account their observed actual costs and their actual benefits realized over a three year period.

These reports are post deployment analyses and, as such, provide a full picture into the adoption of the technology, not just what you think is going to happen, but the actual challenges involved with implementation and the progressive ramp to value recognition within an organization.

We also provide annual market framing reports in the form of our value matrix, where vendors are measured relatively in terms of functionality and usability.

The primary metrics that we see related to customer value. Functionality in terms of what you actually need, and is it going to be suited to your use cases, and usability because the value of a technology you don't use is always going to be negative.

We publish twenty five of these reports per year for each of our core coverage areas.

As Paul mentioned, I am the lead analyst for Nucleus covering the iPaaS market. And over the past three years, I have spoken with customers across multiple industries and technology foundations to inform my research.

With that, let's discuss what we are seeing in the space.

First and most importantly, application ecosystems are growing faster than ever.

The average company now maintains over two hundred distinct applications, making integration and automation increasingly challenging.

Large enterprises frequently maintain independent tech stacks for internal departments and business units.

This may be by choice with independent control of technology spend and budgets by departments or business units.

Or in many cases, this is the result of acquisition led growth strategies that force organizations to piece together independent technology stacks.

You'll hear more about this from Helen and Carmen shortly as this was one of the key drivers of iPaaS adoption for Avid.

Small organizations aren't left out either.

In our research, we see these companies looking to software earlier and earlier in their life cycle to address broad and niche challenges alike.

Software is ubiquitous, and it now addresses everything.

Despite this, IT budgets remain stagnant.

Companies are expected to do more workload with the same resources.

Don't get me wrong. As an analyst, I think these stagnant budgets are ridiculous given the substantial change in the software landscape that we've seen over the past few years. But unfortunately, this is the reality.

Left unaddressed, management of data and systems take up significant time and resources for most organizations, straining technical talent, which is in short supply and should be focused on innovation and more productive tasks.

Finally, it wouldn't be a presentation in 2024 without talking a little bit about AI.

Although there has been discussion at length regarding the potential of AI, When you're looking at customer value and actual implementations, most use cases remain experimental due to data limitations and have yet to produce value.

When AI projects are successfully deployed and do present business value, it is often heavily dependent on connected, well managed data informing an organization's targeted use case.

Now we've discussed the challenges, but let's zoom in and consider the financial impact that traditional approaches or manual integration has. Next slide.

We do so at Nucleus using the lens of TCO or total cost of ownership, analyzing solution cost alongside hidden costs such as maintenance, support, and training.

Manual approaches and point solutions are often more expensive even in instances where they present a lower sticker price or upfront cost.

This is largely due to the hidden costs associated with these solutions, such as additional management and training, which can burden technical teams.

Users often have to manage an integration problem among their integration solutions and spend sixty to eighty percent of budget just on maintenance tasks with this approach.

In short, it's not the initial cost that gets you, but the ongoing maintenance and support.

In our analysis throughout the past three years, we have seen fifteen to twenty nine percent higher TCO using manual approaches or point solutions.

But TCO isn't the only cost factor to consider.

On the next side, we'll look into some of the opportunity costs in terms of the benefits foregone.

The first is cross system coordination, particularly in the form of automation and data management.

Circling back to our market challenges we discussed previously, it is nearly impossible to effectively manage data and processes across hundreds of systems with manual methods.

Rather, these manual methods force organizations to realize a limited scope of both.

In an environment defined by constrained budgets and limited technical teams, this simply doesn't work.

Automation needs to be prioritized to make sure your business is both efficient today and effectively set up for future success as application ecosystems only continue to get more complicated.

Adaptability is also key, especially in the modern, fast changing software landscape.

Slow development restricts organizations when launching integrated products and services, and outsized maintenance efforts further limit innovation.

This slow development can stop you from going that extra mile that your organization needs, adopting software that your organization needs, or creating new integrated products and services to better serve your customers.

Now although opportunity costs are not typically a forcing factor in technology adoption, AI is changing this equation.

Organizations are racing to differentiation, and those that don't have their data estate in order are struggling to find success with their projects.

New entrants are popping up every day who are better suited to harness AI's promise across industries, and you need to have your data in order in order to compete.

So we've hinted at the cost, the challenges, but what's the value brought from a modern iPaaS solution?

Next slide.

First, it's the value of consolidated capabilities, delivering up to twenty nine percent lower total cost of ownership.

Modern iPaaS solutions can consolidate a variety of capabilities, including automation, application integration, data integration, API management, and more within a single environment, which better equips developers to do their day to day tasks and technical teams.

And there's a reason I mentioned automation first.

Automation drives substantial business returns, not just for my coverage, but across all of our coverage areas here at Nucleus. CRM, ERP, you name it.

But cross system coordination is where modern iPaaS solutions really shine.

Automation can only work across properly connected systems.

As such, the consolidation of integration and automation tools is natural and provides a more fully actualized versions of both. If you could connect these systems together, you can more effectively automate across them.

Modern iPaaS solutions also improve the delivery of integrated products and services.

This allows organizations to bring more automations and integrations to production in a fraction of the time, simplifies the build experience, and most importantly, simplifies management.

This translates into broad time savings and enhanced agility, which is especially critical in 2024 as your businesses grapple with changes to technology and continue to look to reinvent your tech stack.

Again, there is always someone coming along who is taking advantage of the new wave of tech. If you have established tech that's weighing you down, you need modern integration solutions to keep up with these new entrants. Now although this business case is straightforward, automation and value creation adoption and value creation is always easier said than done. On the next slide, we'll give you a few important best practices that Nucleus recommends for organizations starting their iPaaS journey.

First and most important is to start with use cases capable of delivering the greatest value.

We encourage organizations to lay out potential applications and prioritize all of them based on the magnitude of time or money spent and the number of users impacted.

The use cases that are easiest to implement and have the broadest impact are going to deliver the greatest business returns and are going to enable you to justify your adoption decision.

Organizations should also adopt continuous improvement and monitoring.

This approach ensures that problems are addressed before they can impact business operations, and ideally, this reduces error rates over time as well for process automation and integrated services.

I won't, I won't spoil Avid's part, but they take advantage of both of these.

Now speaking of Avid, onto the star of the show, Avid success.

Again, I don't wanna steal Helen and Carmen's thunder. So instead, I will focus on providing an understanding of how the ROI analysis was performed.

First thing we do is we start with an analysis of the cost.

This includes pre start factors, such as the internal cost of implementation and external consulting costs.

We also analyze ongoing spend, including subscription or license costs, ongoing support, and ongoing maintenance.

By the end of the analysis, we should have a fully formed TCO of the deployed solution for which to compare the benefits.

Next, we look at the organization's benefits.

Next slide.

Although benefits can take many forms, we typically categorize each into one of three buckets.

The first being cost savings, the second being productivity improvements or time savings, and the third being impacts to revenue and profitability.

Now why these three categories?

We choose these because they all manifest in an organization's financial statements either directly with no leaps to get to dollar value or indirectly through at most a single step to translate into a dollar figure.

Typically, in our ROI studies, we take a less is more approach. So rather than trying to quantify every benefit of a platform, we look for the top three or four which really drove business value.

In this way, our analyses frequently underrepresent the returns present, but provide a reasonable sense of the actual drivers of adoption and value for our readership.

In our analysis of Avid, we evaluated three programs specifically.

This included payable invoice automation, support for data platform modernization, and the removal of legacy technology.

Helen and Carmen will provide you with a deeper dive into each, but these three were the biggest areas of return for the organization and what we quantified in our study.

Now on the next side, you'll see some of our results. We applied this methodology to Avid's deployment of TRAE and observed the following.

I won't go into too much depth as Helen and Carmen will discuss the business impact shortly, but I did wanna highlight a few important findings.

First, I wanna contextualize the one hundred ninety four percent ROI.

This is an annualized ROI and shows how the ongoing benefits far eclipsed pre-start initial cost in each year following deployment.

Worded differently, the organization saw almost two times its initial investment in the technology each year in return.

Second is the seven point two month payback period.

This means that Avid recognized positive net cash flows on its investment in tray within seven point two months of adoption.

The last figure I wanna call out is the cost to benefit ratio.

Whereas ROI looks at benefits relative to pre star costs, the cost to benefit ratio gives a full sense of all of the costs incurred including ongoing with all of the benefits.

You'll see for every dollar invested in Tray, Avid saw three dollars and forty cents returned.

Now over to Helen and Carmen to show you how these results were actually achieved in their own words. Thank you.

Thanks very much, Alex.

Really pleased to be joined by Helen, Comninos and Carmen Glenister at Avid Property Group.

Helen is the general manager of business operations, and Carmen is the enterprise architect over at Avid. And, with that, I'm gonna hand it over to Helen who's gonna take you through. And Helen, Carmen, how you could take you through how they built a modern integration strategy at over Avid. Over to you, Helen.

Thank you. Thank you, Paul. Look. We're thrilled for this opportunity. We're very proud of this one. So we're great so that we can share with you what we've done.

So maybe just to give you a little bit of a context about Avid Property Group, Carm, if you can just move on to the slide first. Thank you. So Avid is a large-scale residential developer predominantly on the eastern seaboard. So we were born in 2016 when we separated from Investa.

As you can see in the middle, our ethos and our values are very important to us. It's about bringing people together. So everything we do is around integrating people, and that's internal as well as for our customers.

Our products are, as you can see from those three tiles, large residential communities as in land subdivision and all that goes with it, home communities as in building homes on land, and our very new product line that we're launching now, which is our, resort communities targeting over fifty fives.

So we're approximately four point nine billion gross revenue in the pipeline.

But then when you think about the fact that we're only a hundred and fifty employees in the business, that is indeed quite an accomplishment.

It's important to note about Avid is that we go through two ways. One, we either grow organically, so purchase of more land or in our product line, and the second one is we grow through acquisitions of other companies that then increase our asset value and portfolio.

Just to move on to the next one. So, context would change for when all of this started and we were introduced into Tray was, as far back as 2019. There was an acquisition that happened when Avid acquired Villaworld Homes. And with that acquisition, there were two very separate tech environments that were introduced into the business.

Interesting enough, it was just as we went into COVID, so there was always fun times around trying to do everything on the fly when you're, when you're in lockdown, but, I can share with you the strategy on the next slide that we prepared.

So we looked at it and said, we've got a three year plan ahead of us, and it was a large-scale sort of digital transformation that we decided to take on. We first started before we went into the digital space around the sort of people and process, so integrating that into the business. Then when we turned our sites to technology, we set about these three three stages. So stage one was to set the foundations, and that was really just establishing the operational efficiency that we could, the basics, and putting all those foundationals in place.

The second one was around integrating and mobile, which was really the big phase of redesigning our environment and bringing the two businesses together. And then the third phase that we've said for ourselves is to be future ready and capitalize on all the investment that we've had in our technology and our environment in order to get avid growth ready. And it's growth ready for, being able to grow organically, but very importantly so that we can integrate any future acquisitions that come into our business. And in fact, right now as we speak, in the next week, we're going live with another acquisition that we've made.

So getting the tech stack right and and and buying the right tools and products in order to be able to support us was very important for us. And, you know, it's been an interesting journey, but we really enjoyed it.

I'm gonna hand it over to Carm now. He's gonna actually share with you some of that journey and some of the specifics that we did. And I need to just say before we start here that the only way you can do this is to have incredible people in your business, and Carm is certainly one of those. She's an incredible enterprise architect who took us on this journey around realizing our tech strategy. Thanks, Carm.

Thank you. Thanks, Helen.

So thank you very much for the opportunity. I think it's really been, like Helen says, a very fast three year adventure.

We've managed to deliver some incredible things. So we'd like to just take you on a part of that journey with us, also share our experiences with you and walk you through how we went from stage one to stage three. So, we'll start with the challenge that we were presented with.

As Helen was saying, we were trying to merge two businesses together. What we found from a general technology point of view was, a lot of our infrastructure had gone end of life.

It's not only gone end of life infrastructure, but, operating systems, all all end of life, all gone end of life. We had a lot of infrastructure that had begun to fail. So from time to time, we had used server hard drives, those kinds of things.

We had very old and patchy data. So, yes, they had a data warehouse which had structural data integrity issues. It didn't have all the data they needed in it. It was only updated once a day, so it wasn't very useful. They had a lot of legacy applications, applications that are not fit for modern scalability.

We had a big lack of cyber capability within the business.

It was very expensive to maintain all of the legacy infrastructure and then trying to support ourselves from protecting the end of life.

It was also expensive. We had no ability to scale, which is, as Helen was mentioning, one of our key capabilities is that we have to be able to scale.

So should we do another acquisition, should we grow, we need to be able to scale, and we had nothing in the infrastructure stack that would allow us to do that.

We had a lot of duplication of data. We even had various systems mastering the same data.

And then we had a lot of applications that had not been upgraded, So not in seven or more years that they've been upgraded. So that was the overarching technical challenge within the integration space.

We had tightly coupled systems. So they were basically hard coded together, and I think that might have driven the non upgrading of systems because, generally, if you try and upgrade one of the systems, the tightly coupled integration would have broken.

We also had, where there was integration because it was tightly coupled that designed it with a daisy chain. So, basically, system a gives the information to system b, system b gives the information to system c. So if you break one of those systems, the entire daisy chain basically falls apart. We had a lot of systems, key systems, for example, the financial system that was not integrated into the environment.

We had a lot of what we all know as swivel chair integration, which is the dear old human being acting as the integration layer, copying data from one system to another.

We had no ability to do any real time integration or automation for that matter. We had a lot of database to database integration, which I think, again, leads to non upgrading of applications because, generally, when you do an upgrade, databases change.

We had no integration documentation, so any integration that had been built was all custom built, and was not not documented.

And then within the integrations that existed, there was no audit trails, audit logs, or ability to to track what was happening in the integration space.

So that was our challenge when we arrived.

One of the first things that we needed to do was ensure that we had an integration tool that we could leverage across the organization, across all business units, and, we embarked on an RFI.

We evaluated a couple of different integration options. We decided we definitely wanted an iPaaS. So, we used the iPaaS, Gartner quadrants to do a selection of tools. We landed up selecting from MuleSoft, Workato, Tray, Dell Boomi, and Talend.

Our key points that we needed from our integration tool was we needed not only integration, but the ability to do business process automation.

We also needed a capability to allow us to transfer data into a data platform so that we could build a proper data reporting capability.

We also needed something that was gonna be cost effective. A lot of integration tools are cost inhibiting because you cannot stack up the costs of integrating, so you forgo the integration because the cost is too high.

And then last but not least, we needed something that can scale with Avid. We need something that can fit a small business and a large business and can scale as we scale.

After our RFI, we chose Tray.

And I think Tray has been pivotal to unlocking the three phases that we had to go through.

Without a proper capability, we couldn't have achieved what we did.

So pay was key, and that was one of the first things that we actually did in the first phase.

In the Nucleus results we have, they talk about three programs of work that we did.

I'm gonna run through those three programs of work with you.

The first one is a pretty detailed one, and this is the one that the Nucleus results were based on. A very specific use case, we had to automate our invoicing processes, and we had to start with this particular project because like most other things like Tray, automating this process unlocked the ability to do a lot of the reduction in the landscape that was required.

So the first thing that we had to do was basically build the process up and then automate it. So what we've got is we've got all of our invoices hitting an inbox. There's some rules on the inbox that send invoices to Tray.

Tray checks that it does a whole lot of validation checks on it. Is it an invoice? Does it have the right amount of pages?

There's various data that we extract out of the email. For example, the date it was received, who it was received by.

Once that's done, we send the invoice for OCR in to just grab most of the invoice details out. That all gets sent back to Tray.

Tray does a public API call to check the tax status of that vendor as well as whether they are registered for GST, etcetera. That information is all fed back in to enrich the invoices.

Tray then does database lookups to check that the banking details are the same as the ones that we have in our finance system.

There is also another database lookup done to enrich the invoice so that we can do straight through processing. So straight through processing means that there's no human being involved in the processing of the invoice.

And then we run a whole lot of business rules against the invoice within Tray, and we compile a list of validations that we also share to the accounts payable team if we found anything not right with the invoice.

Then the last step in the process is that Tray uploads the invoice into the finance system.

For this, we have to convert the PDF into images, and then we have to upload the invoice with all of its notes. And lastly but not least, if the invoice failed, we also let the AP team know that the invoice failed.

So this process, like I say, was very important. We needed this unlocked in order to move through our three pillars.

For this is the Nucleus ROI that we achieved. We also achieved great results. We've got ninety five percent of our invoices that do straight through processing. We've got around five percent, that needs to be dealt with manually.

These are really exceptions.

In fact, I think it's probably less than five percent now. We've had it running for about a year, and it's probably, I think, almost around two percent exceptions now. And I say most of the exceptions are duplications of invoices. So I think it's a pretty good outcome.

The second pillar of work that we used to try to to unlock was to build a data platform.

We chose Google BigQuery for our data platform.

We use Tray to ingest data out of all of our key systems.

So our CRM, our finance system, our construction systems, our project management systems.

We chose all our key systems and systematically integrated them using Tray, pushing all their data via the concept of extract, load, transform into BigQuery. And then from BigQuery, we've got two, pivotal things sitting on top of it, which is obviously our business insights platform and our planning and forecasting tool.

In addition to that, Tray talks to BigQuery quite a lot, while doing integration with various systems. So either to enrich data, check data, before it passes information, to another system.

What this has also allowed us to do is ensure that we can have one master of each elements of data.

I might have mentioned earlier that we had systems that were multiple systems mastering the same piece of data, so we've managed to unlock that. This has also allowed us to remove any daisy chaining, and systems to operate independently of each other. We can also send the right data to the right system at the right time.

And if we've got new systems that come online, based on our well architected data architect, he's designed the integration so that it's very flexible and scalable. We can onboard a new system through Tray into Google BigQuery in a really short amount of time.

So this has unlocked a lot for us, and I know everybody likes to talk about the AI word. So, but you need data in order to make AI work. So by implementing this capability, it's almost laying the groundwork for us to then leverage the data to further, you know, use AI and other capabilities to to make the data more useful.

So that was our second program of work that's been completed.

And then last but definitely not least, Avid, did a move to the cloud.

And in doing the moves to the cloud, this was the last step we had to do, to realize our modernization strategy.

We had a hundred and forty four on prem servers.

We had multiple applications running on those servers.

We had, like I say, a lot of it was end of life.

So I think you guys might know the seven the seven r's. So we applied this strategy across the tech stack.

So either rehost, retire, relocate, replatform, refactor, retain, or repurchase.

A lot of companies decide to do the move and then apply the seven r's. We decided to apply the seven r's and then move.

This was actually quite successful for us. Although, I think we implemented over a hundred and fifty changes in order to get ready to move to the cloud. A lot of what we managed to do is the retire and relocate. So we moved functionality to other systems.

We retired a lot of the legacy systems. We retired a lot of our legacy operating systems. I think, in total, over a hundred and four legacy servers we managed to decommission.

And in doing our relocation to the cloud, we also managed to replatform a lot of our our leftover servers. So taking advantage of serverless platforms, within AWS such as using RDS instead of SQL Server, on an EC two instance.

We managed to leverage FSx instead of using, again, just a normal, EC two instance or an s three bucket.

So we managed to do a lot of replatforming, and modernizing in the process.

One of the key things that we did once we were in AWS is we needed Tray to plug into our environment. Tray was very helpful to us.

We managed to set up Tray coming directly into AWS through transit gateway.

And, with Tray in our AWS environment, we can now successfully link Tray to Google BigQuery and everything in our AWS environment.

So massive amounts of work. Great outcome.

Hundred and forty four to thirty three is a pretty impressive move, and most of it is modernized.

So, yes, it's a really great outcome. A lot of work and a really small team, but, I think we had the right people, the right vendors, and, definitely the right tools to get the job done.

So going back to the Nucleus report, the results from the first program of work, which was the invoice automation that we chatted about, the key to unlocking the rest of the process.

These slides are from Nucleus.

So we basically had a payback period of zero point six years. This is based on people doing their normal job as well as running this project.

Annual ROI is a hundred ninety four percent, and our average benefit was over three hundred thousand dollars. I think we continue to reap the benefits of this particular project.

Because Avid is scaling up, the volume of invoices has increased dramatically even since we did this ROI.

We're processing thousands of invoices, every month, and, this has definitely allowed us to scale without having to, bring in more headcount and also allow the level of automation which is required to scale without bringing in additional headcount. So I think that's a really good outcome.

Other than Tray, was given the Nucleus reward in the top ten for 2024 because of our results. And I can say that that particular solution would not have been possible without Tray.ai.

We definitely did business process automation through that solution, not just integration, but it had a level of everything in it. So it had process automation, system to system integration, leveraging on the data platform that we built. It was definitely, everything coupled together to make that work with Tray squarely in the middle.

I will hand it back to Helen.

Thank you, Carm. Yes. It's good when you see it in this perspective because you can see exactly how much work, and we're all very proud of, of what we accomplished in the shortest space of time.

I also need to mention that we had a consultant company come in in order to, quote us as to what it would take in order to, for instance, have moved to the cloud program.

And, the price tag they gave us was six million around that. Now I can comfortably say my budget is nowhere near that. So, we're very proud that we found the solution and using Tray and leveraging our partners. We managed to do that in considerably more cost effective, in fact, under three hundred and fifty k. So, again, something we're really very proud of.

Looking at next steps now.

So as I mentioned early on, we had the R3 stage program that we've been undertaking. We've been very systematic in how we've been doing that. So coming out of the tail end of the integrated mobilized, we are now looking at the future ready stuff. And as everyone else, we are definitely taking on AI.

We are looking at all the different avenues that we can explore with it. So first step, as Carm mentioned, is to get the data ready, and we need to get our data categorized, and ready so that we can capitalize on AI, but do it in a safe way. So we're doing quite a bit of work around how we're gonna position AI and how we can use it in the business.

We are also, though, still carrying on leveraging, automation.

Automation is certainly the key to be able to bring about efficiency in a way that then releases our teams to be able to do the real value add work.

So we've been looking at areas that particularly lend themselves to it. We've got some use cases identified, for instance, in our legal space. We've got in our acquisition space where there's a lot of data that they look at in research and how we can bring that in so that they don't have to worry about how to, bring the data in and how to bring it to reporting. They just have to worry about the value add around and the interpretation of it.

So there's two use cases there. Of course, AI and automation lends itself into the HR space. We've got quite a bit happening in the marketing space as well. A lot of digital transformation there, and we definitely capitalizing on every digital means we can.

We're also I mentioned earlier, I'm busy with an acquisition at the moment, which is in our new, product line LLC.

So the good news is given the framework that Carm shared early on is it's made that process significantly easier. We've got two new systems that we are introducing into the business as a consequence of that, but it is considerably easier to be able to introduce it into the business and bring the data, where we need it to be so that we can make decisions and we can get everything efficient in the process. So excited about that. So pretty much, we are at the point where we are identifying our use cases in each of the functional areas.

But it's a good place to be because we've got the foundations. We've done the hard yards around getting the environment into a place where we can, have optionality around how we want to use our tech and what case study, and that will help us to scale for the future. So we're really excited about that.

It's our story. That's the Avid case study that we've been working on. Thanks for letting us share our story.

Thank you very much, Helen and Carmen. Well, you've been very busy. Alright?

Got got a few questions for you. Got a few questions for you, actually.

Yeah, when you went through the, some of the use cases, common on your invoice processing and process automation and you know, data and classic data integration, with, with, with BigQuery and then the modernization. Also, there's a lot of different, different use cases. And when you went through the evaluation, how important was it that you can, like, look at that kind of Goldilocks of, like, you can pull those different use cases in in one solution?

Very important. That was one of our key criteria is we didn't have the budgets or the capacity to handle multiple tools, to achieve that. I know that there are tools that specialize in all three of those areas, but it was not an option to have three tools. We've got a very small team.

I think there's six of us in total.

So we have one data architect. We have one integration specialist.

We have myself. So our our technicals, people are limited, and to have multiple tools would have just been too hard from from that point of view and also to the cost point of view would have just been cost inhibiting to try and bring in three different tools.

Got it. That's yeah. That's what makes a lot of sense. Then, when you know, as you guys are making a decision, what was the I mean, often it's hard to say, hey.

You know, now we're gonna make a change. We're gonna we're gonna do something. What was the kind of breaking point? You said, okay.

What what we have right now is not a go forward for us. We have to put in a new platform. Was there one big breaking point?

Or Well, there was, you know, that's set at a strategic level because the mandate to us was and to myself was to integrate the business.

We couldn't, we would not be able to integrate the business because we had such different environments. We had Avid on the one side, and then we had Villawill on the other, which was this tightly coupled that Carmen described, and Avid was pretty much nonintegrated.

So we could not bring the one into the other. So pretty much, we knew that in order to be able to integrate the environment, we had to do quite drastic moves because we could not continue in our environment. So as Carmen mentioned, all those challenges, we had a failing environment. We had legacy tech. It was end of life. It wasn't upgraded.

So the catalyst really was we had to integrate the business. We could you know, based on the, on the acquisition. If Avid continued the way it was and it wasn't, in the in the in, you know, acquisition mode, probably, maybe they could have continued with minor changes. But with the big changes that we needed to do, we had to pretty much go big bang in some of the changes. And it was pretty, hair raising because as Scott mentioned, we didn't have that much of a team. So if things go wrong, they go wrong.

But it was really just everybody just jumping in, clapping in together, and getting the business ready for the magnitude of the change that we needed to bring about.

Got it. And just one final question. What I mean, what was the most important driver, like, the criteria? Was it was there one, like, no compromise driver within the selection process you had to have?

So I think definitely, you know, it must be an iPaaS, again, because we didn't want to spend a lot of time and money just to get the tool up and running, in our own environment. So, iPaaS was definitely key.

And even though we looked at tools that were iPaaS, as we went down the avenue of the RFI, it turns out that some of those tools are not completely iPaaS. They do still require you to install certain things in your environment. So Tray was definitely a true iPaaS. We literally got given the keys, which was a username and password, and off we went. There was no, yeah, there was no time and energy spent getting Tray up and running in our environment, which was great.

I gotta say, I mean, I've I've been into the software for, like, twenty plus years and like to to find a team that can hand living from hardcore classical data integration, you know, BigQuery, you know, ETL, right, to to business process to was that was that a hundred and forty four? That gave me nine minutes, a hundred and forty four on prem appointments. I was starting to have PTSD.

It's just a huge achievement. So it's really, really, really fun to see you through that.

And so I think that's all the questions we have.

This was hugely helpful and I think, you know, really insightful for the folks on the on the on the the event here. So, thank you. Thank you, Helen, and thank you, Carmen, for taking you through, your story and the process you went through and some of the criteria and the results as well. So thank you to you and to the Avid team.

Oh, you're very welcome. Thank you for having us and giving us the opportunity to check with you guys.

Thank you.

Well, Greg, we've got some additional questions here from the audience. I just wanna kinda jump into them.

So I guess the first question here is around AI. Right? As Alex mentioned, there's a that's on everyone's, everyone's thinking, right, this year and going to next year. Really, about how does AI change integrations requirements and delivery?

There's really kind of two, I guess, two areas. Right? The first is, how you develop. Right?

Using AI to build integrations faster. So it's augmented development. Right? So the Copilot experiences are Tray.

We have a modern build. Right? So you can use a natural language to define your integration. Right?

And you can frame it out and get the to get a good chunk of the work out of the way using GenAI, and then go ahead and build a custom customize the rest to the last month of integration. Things like AI generating documentation, right, as well as suggestions around performance as well. So using AI to help with the whole build process.

And also there's also infusion as well. Right? So your requirements that are coming for the business around things like extracting data from documents, text classification, sentiment analysis, connecting different large language models, getting the best databases for RAG use cases, those kinds of things. And so it's also important to ensure that the IPaaS you use handles infusion use cases as well. So it's everything from building fast using AI to handling new AI requirements. Anything to add to that, Alex?

I think you hit the nail on the head there.

The value of these services is really increasing with AI capabilities infused into iPaaS. The one thing that I would want to add is just on the value of consistency. I spoke a lot in the market framing section there about why AI projects succeed, where they fail.

The more relevant information that you can give, whether that's metadata, whether that's context, and where you bring in from multiple sources, the more successful these projects are. So having an iPaaS that can really add consistency to how that data is brought together can improve the success of those initiatives. And then to your point, the value of these products is just increasing by accelerating that build experience and making it easier for the end user.

Great. You got a question for you, Alex, here.

So, how can we use this information if we don't have a sense of the cost or benefits need to build out an ROI? Right? So I guess, business case planning question.

Yeah. That's a really good question, and we get it frequently with our ROI analysis. It is very rarely do people have those figures, but I think it's the mindset that really helps. So especially when we get technical solutions, you get caught up thinking about the capabilities and what is being delivered, what is the performance that's delivered. Whereas, when you're really looking from a financial perspective, you wanna see what is the business value. So wherever you could rephrase these technical capabilities into what are the costs that it's reducing, what is the productivity improvements that it's bringing, or what are the business cases that this is unlocking for your organization, that's how you really change from a technology mindset to a value mindset and champion a project for your organization, how you really sell it to those financial buyers themselves.

Yeah. That's, yeah, that's that's that's that's a helpful, helpful answer to a case of common question. Right?

The question here is is this exclusive for IT? Right? Or can business teams use it? And so what will we typically find is that, what we typically see is a kind of a fusion team type delivery.

Right? It's a kind of combination of business teams, you know, in finance or in sales, working with the IT innovation, you know, the IT automation put in the platform. Right? And, you know, surround it with the governance management in instrumentation.

Right? But the business teams are building using your low low code, right, or AI committed development. And also building using composable development too, which is where, you know, the IT innovation might build some of the hardcore, you know, underlying integrations to the ERP system, right, or to the CRM system. Maybe, or maybe build some of the underlying elements to integrate with the large hemorrhage model to make sure there's data masking and obfuscation taking place between the company's data and the LN.

And then the business teams will then take those kinds of building blocks, right, and then start to assemble that into kind of high order integrations or automations, whether it's, you know, an order to cash integration or, you know, customer service desk, right, or a lead life cycle. Right. And but the most important thing is that the change control, right, if you don't you don't have IT on the hook of every single change you wanna make, right, that hurts the productivity. So, like, the goal here is that you empower the business teams, you know, as their order cash requirements, but if life cycle requirements change, right, or maybe they're gonna add a new field, for example, or change a business rule, that they're empowered to do that to themselves.

Right? But there's also the government surrounding it to do it in a governed way.

Anything to add, Alex?

No. I think you nailed it there. Certainly, I would say AI as well as any of these additional capabilities is really opening up, iPaaS adoption beyond just IT teams. And as I had mentioned earlier, you know, IT teams are very constrained.

Technical talent has a lot on their plate, and there's a lot of productive tasks that they could really focusing on. So the ability to really shift ownership of, especially automation and integration over to business users who have a better sense of what this data is being used for, and what are the business cases that this is going to unlock. That's really where the value lies. And it's a great point.

You really wanna open this up beyond IT.

Well, Well, I think that that's everything. And so I just wanna thank all of the speakers. I mean, Alex and Helen and, and Carmen.

So, obviously, we cover a lot of ground here. Right? I think from, you know, how to build a use case. Right? How to build a business case, I'd say, Avid's process, you know, thinking about ROI, and kind of that overall kind of session criteria in our platform as well.

Just to kind of look into the next steps, you know, if you're ready to start, taking a closer look, you can request a demo on Tray.ai.

You know, Nucleus has published research right on the iPaaS value matrix. Right? It covers the leaders in the space.

But, yeah, if you'd love to continue the discussion and take your head and request a demo or a trial that Tray as well. So you just get hands on and start building, yourself as well. So with that, wanna thank, everyone and, and thanks your time and have a great day.