Standardizing Data Flows for Scalable eCommerce with Robert Rand from iPaaS.com - EP024

Foreign. Hi everyone. Welcome back to the E Commerce Masters podcast, the show where we unpack what's driving digital growth for modern manufacturers and distributors. I'm your host, Ethan Giffen, founder and CEO of Groove Commerce, where we help mid market companies modernize how they sell online. Today we're talking about one of the biggest challenges facing every growing B2B organization and that is data integration. When your ERP, CRM, E commerce and fulfillment systems don't talk to each other, growth definitely stalls. My guest today is Robert Rand, Chief partnership officer@ipass.com, a platform helping companies simplify and standardize how their data flows across the entire tech stack. Robert's been in the e commerce world for nearly two decades, leading partnerships, advising brands and helping agencies like ours connect complex systems into a single scalable hub. Robert, it is great to have you here on the show today. Man. Welcome to the E Commerce Masterclass. Great to be here. Yeah, well, thanks for having me. I am so excited to have you here today. We have so many great conversations at the events that we go to together and I'm excited to be able to share some of that with our listeners today. Absolutely. You and I, it's almost as if our travel schedules were written together. We're at all the great e comm events. Yes. Yep. All the time. All the time. So let's start. I like to start from the beginning. So how did you first get into E commerce and what led you to join ipass.com? that's a winding road. Well, so I actually I grew up around a family business that was in manufacturing and distribution since 1969. My family was in the ladies handbag business, you know, purses. And so I, I knew, you know, I could do anything in the business other than run sewing machines, hydraulic presses, accounting, certainly the tech stack and you know, so got some early experience with E commerce and understanding a lot of the, the business challenges of scaling with technology and modernizing. Fast forward. I went on with technology in my career, wound up helping to lead a digital agency for about a decade and brought some amazing brands into E commerce and helped with a team of 40 people to design, develop and market these sorts of sites, both B2C and a lot of B2B and I'd say we were earlier in that than a lot of others because of that background that my brother and I came with at the time. And I've moved forward through the industry and joined the team here@ipass.com about two and a half years ago. Now time flies really had done some really good work with the predecessor to iPass.com, which was a systems integration business back in my agency days. While I was off in the next steps of my career, this team decided that the world needed a better software integration and data integration platform. They spent millions of dollars writing hundreds of thousands of lines of code, creating what's now ipass.com and moved on from being a service provider to being a, a SaaS, a software as a service company offering this technology to the world. And when I came, they were already pretty well established and had a great list of accounts and it was time to build more of these partnerships like we have with the Groove Team. Absolutely. That's great. That's great. It's always fun to hear origin stories. Like myself, I started out. My dad ran facilities management for an entire school system. So I started out like cleaning schools over the summers, running floor buffers and, you know, like cleaning venetian blinds and stripping floors and kind of shampooing carpet. You know, some days I wish I could go back to the simplicity of, of, of of that, but it's always fun to have a diverse set of skills, so to speak, with things. Well, and you never know where that foundational experience is going to lead you that. By the third grade, they were pulling me out of class for an hour day to help the computer teacher. I was always one of those nerds. I wear it well. That's great. Yeah. And you know, so that like, I was doing it for businesses and people from a young age that it was just, you know, some people were, you know, like shoveling snow or mowing lawns or whatever. And I was helping with all of the IT and technology and computer needs. And even in high school, you know, some kids were off at sleepaway camp and I was doing like Westinghouse science projects on robotics at a university. So like that's. But again, you know, learning those systems at the time, even though, like, I'm not a computer programmer, I'm not a developer by trade, but I've learned programming languages and understanding the foundations of how all these things come together, speaking the language. I find that in many ways I'm translating between, you know, the, the technologists and the business, you know, stakeholders and trying to get that meeting of the minds of what does the market really need and, and does the market really understand the technology and so on. Yeah. It's funny, I think I had a very similar path to you of in elementary school, helping with the computers and, and also never a developer, but always able to help translate between the technical side with the business side and get them in sync because they kind of communicate in different ways. So that's cool. Many of us in the early days, it's a story that I hear over and over again. But so for our listeners hearing about IPASS for the very first time, what exactly does the platform do and who, who is it built for? Like who are, what is your ideal customer? So an IPASS I should mention, stands for integration Platform as a Service. And so we are a software platform in the cloud where merchants and other organizations get an account@ipass.com and that account acts as their grand central station for all the data that needs to flow between all the different software and departments within their business. And so could be, you know, finance and operations and marketing and sales and you know, human resources and all kinds of different departments are using different systems that need to ideally be interwoven in sustainable ways where they can access the necessary data to operate efficiently. And so Ethan, as you were saying, you know, sometimes this is going to involve erp, CRM, Ecom. You know, there are so many systems, order management, warehouse management, 3PL, shipping and fulfillment. You know, if we're thinking about that category of getting goods moving, could be product information management software to help get the, you know, the, the product organized and tagged and, and get all the rich information that's going to help shoppers not only find the products but fall in love with them. Could be sales tax exemption certificate management. Right, that there's just different data that different stakeholders need to be able to leverage and that ideally you want to automate. And so ipass.com is sort of a universal translator of sorts of we have a marketplace of integrations to key systems like various E commerce platforms. Hook up your E commerce website to our system, turn on another spoke to the hub to get it talking to, let's say your erp. Now you can have product data including prices and inventory from the ERP going to the E Comm, order data flowing down to be fulfilled order status updates and shipping and tracking information going back out to the E commerce site to notify the shoppers and close out the orders and, and so on. But then you can start saying, well if the orders are coming down, let's not only send them from the E comm to the erp, let's send them to the CRM so the sales team has visibility and let's send them to the warehouse management software where we're going to fulfill this order out of and not out of the erp, but we'll use the ERP for accounting and you know, you're able to really start to think about what is the best path and sometimes things have to stitch together. So it might be, you know, you're going to have the product prices and inventory always come out of the erp, but maybe you're going to enrich the rest of the product data in a PIM and that's all got to come together and make it to the sales channels. And so a lot of different examples that I could provide but at the end of the day it's really about, you know, the fact that we're all now data businesses whether we elected to be or not. That's the modern society that we live in. And being able to have a lot more of a predictable, maintainable, manageable way of doing that. Not just trying to get data from A to B or B to C and deal with one off point to point connectors that you have to maintain, but rather having something that's purpose built for this. That's awesome. That's awesome. So when we're building E Commerce systems, we lean on your team and your product a lot. What makes your approach different from other middleware or integration products? Well, I'd say there's kind of a continuum, you know, if you think about it, of everything started with just custom one off connections and getting data from A to B with something one person wrote and there's a bunch of spaghetti code as I'd say, sitting somewhere that that one person knows. And if the data doesn't get where it's going or, or the integration needs to be updated to be compatible with upgrades in the E Commerce or ERP or other system or if maybe you need to make some changes to it, map some new fields. Good luck. Right now you've taken on technical debt. You're responsible for hosting and maintaining and managing this one off thing that not a lot of people know what's going on within and it's very cumbersome. And as you have more and more software that you're trying to connect this way, you're just multiplying the problem that when data fails to flow, you're getting four teams together two weeks later to duke it out. Is it the source, the destination, the middleware, what's going on, who's going to fix it and when? What we see is the hub and spoke is ultimately at the core of what makes us different. Being able to turn on different spokes, replace spokes. As things change in your tech stack, having that one to many, but also having one system that's proactive in how it deals with any data discrepancy, any errors or exceptions in data movement. So a few weeks ago, aws, you know, Amazon's cloud had a big outage. If we're trying to send data to a system and it's not flowing successfully, our system is intelligently built to automatically retry, not to lose the data, to notify the stakeholders of what's happening and why, and provide a bit of a root cause analysis. So it's not waiting for the shopper to call saying where's my order? Or you know, that for some reason couldn't make it into a system because it had too many characters in a field somewhere or, you know, or in different situations, you know, then trying to recreate the error, looking for a needle in a haystack and spending all that time and money debugging. It's really dealing with everything much more proactively and dealing with integrations that are being managed and maintained in the platform. And so we see all that as instrumental. It's a low code platform so users can see what's happening and potentially make some adjustments themselves or take some actions themselves. It's meant to be, you know, while there is complexity to what's happening, our goal is to make everything more user friendly, of course, and so get away from that spaghetti code. And then it's also, you know, that we're providing the platform at flat monthly rates and so it's a much more predictable expense for businesses that they're not dealing with spikes in the hosting of the middleware. They're not dealing with, you know, huge spikes in the maintenance of, oh, you know, this E Commerce platform, just, you know, deprecated that API and you're going to have to rewrite your middleware. So there's a lot of layers there that we get into that. You know, we find just from a continuity perspective that we're bringing down the total cost of ownership significantly and we're empowering businesses to be able to get data moving with more systems and to adjust and to lean in on whatever they need to be doing next to build more efficiency and to build better outcomes for their internal teams and for their customers. I love it. I love it. One of the things that I really love about your product is the queuing and I'm gonna call it the instrumentation, right, the dashboards, the ability to see a visualization of what's happening, what's failing, the ability to kind of pause like when you have A situation like where AWS goes down and half the world is disconnected, you know, for the day, you know. And so people often say to me, well, let's just write it, let's just. Can't you just script it out by, you know, by hand? And I'm like, we never get to that level of instrumentation and queuing. Right. Like it would just be too expensive to do that for a one off integration. And so that's the value of how this is put together. It's also that you're also updating your endpoints as the integration as the other platforms downstream are updating their APIs and making changes and stuff as well, right? Absolutely. And even then occasionally somebody will come with something that's not in our marketplace that they need to integrate within their account. And so we also have an open SDK. And so let's say you need to integrate five pieces of software. Four of them are in our marketplace, one isn't. Your hands aren't tied. You can add that one and by adding that one as, let's call it a private integration within your ipass.com account now that can communicate data with all of your other systems. You're not trying to again deal with it from A to B and A to C, that you're centralizing the effort. And so there's a lot of different situations that we run into. I mean it's also, I mean if we're getting, you know, if we want to geek out on it, it's a mock system and so it auto scales in the cloud. It's API first cloud native, headless. And so let's say you're a manufacturer that is trying to get data flowing with tons of distributors that have their own. Let's say, you know, you're getting your product catalog into their websites now you've got to hook up to umpteen different websites with us. You can script how you want that to happen. And you don't necessarily need to come in and manage that on a user by user basis within the ipass.com system so you can speed things up to do things en masse. You know, you're not worried about what happens when, you know, when there's a big sales increase or when there are big product catalog updates. Our system will intelligently auto scale to handle it and we'll throttle to make sure we're not sending too much data and overwhelming your ERP or whatever systems with too much data all at once. And we'll queue it up and let the data move at a Healthy pace. And so there's just so many different checks and balances that to your point, Ethan, if you were trying to write something as a one off, trying to catch all of these things and support it as a product becomes impossible. And for the, you know, for the end users, the ability to have something where they, it's more visceral, you know, that they can log in and they can interact with. Even though in many cases they're going to turn to their agency for implementation and for some of the ongoing support, being able to jump in and put their hands around it is very, very helpful. So, you know, I always say, and we see it over and over again, that manufacturers and distributors are notorious, I mean, notorious for having disconnected systems. You know, they've got an ERP system over here, maybe they've got a PIM over there, they've got a CRM, maybe they have an E commerce system or they don't. Maybe they've got a warehouse system. You know, what are the most common pain points that you see when you are talking to somebody in the manufacturing and distribution space? So there's a lot of, there's a lot of, you know, almost technical revolution happening in B2B right now that happened years ago in B2C. And to your point, Ethan, I think that when we look at these organizations, they've been able to stick with older systems longer, they've held out longer, and in many cases, you know, that may have served them well. But now you're getting the next generations of buyers in their customer organizations. Their clients are evolving and not everybody is going to. There's so many different ways of submitting an order, let's say, but not everybody's going to call with the order or is going to place the order at a trade show or all these different experiences that we've lived through and that businesses are still engaged with. And I think in some ways sales reps felt like E commerce was, was perhaps in competition with them. Where now it's like, no, you can just service a lot more customers. They can see the available inventory, they can see when that order can be shipped or delivered. They can, you know, you're empowering your customer to get the order placed faster because they're not trying to reach you in the middle of the night. They can get it done and you can keep communicating and servicing with a larger number people because you're not just, you know, an order taker, that you're there as a consultant for them, as support for them. And so as we see these sorts of things there are, you know, I think a lot of it is just digital transformation that's still happening. But to your point, it's in many cases people have gone with something that was, that seemed easier or simpler. And so they didn't get a best in class E commerce platform that they could really scale and grow with. They got something light that could hook up to their ERP as a temporary solution to get them into E commerce. Right. You know, they, they turned on a module somewhere that we see a lot of those sorts of things where they're still running a lot in spreadsheets, they're still manually printing or copying and pasting a lot of things between systems. There's still a lot of manual effort that's going into it. And our goal isn't to take away anybody's jobs, it's really to free those people up to do things that are going to be more impactful and to cut down on timelines on things to build efficiency, cut down on, you know, on the inevitable errors when people are typing things in, you know, data entry, human error issues to cut down on the time it takes to get an order from, let's say the website to the warehouse to be fulfilled that nobody should have to print that out or copy and paste. It should just be near instantaneous. And so a lot of those things, having inventory up to date and making sure that, you know, if an order is being placed that it can be fulfilled and that it's clear to the shopper what is and isn't available. All these friction points that still exist. And so you can run different software in silos, but what you find is, for instance, you know, there are a lot of users that they might hook up their, maybe their E. Comm to a marketing stack to send out email or SMS messages to shoppers. And you know, again, whether you're B2C or B2B, you see these kinds of things happening. But often the data that's in their other sales channels that are coming in through sales reps in the ERP perhaps that data is siloed. And so now you've got marketers sending messages like we haven't seen you lately, you know, here's a discount or something. And meanwhile there was just an order placed over the phone. And so you find these disjointed experiences or I think I mentioned, you know, kind of an offshoot integration that we run into sales tax exemption certificate management. There are systems like Avalara that handle this. And when you're dealing with B2B you're often dealing with wholesale purchasing. And it's nice if the accounting team, if the folks in the ERP know if there's an exemption certificate on file when it expired, that sort of thing. But being able to pull that data into the CRM so that the account managers and salespeople and other folks that might not be in another system can see that same data and interact where we've been running into lately. And another interesting one where, you know, in B2B, not everybody in E commerce is going to pay in the immediate checkout experience. They're often going to pay on net terms or, you know, some kind of offline situation. But we know that waiting for a check in the mail and you know, USPS doesn't seem to be, you know, getting more resources thing these days that it's probably not the best option. Trying to get people to give you credit card numbers over the phone to catch you at the right time. It's not great. And it's no longer particularly PCI compliant because so many calls are recorded that the payment card industry does not want you doing that anymore. And so being able to hook up to a system like we've got an integration with PayFabric from Global Payments, where we'll get an Invoice out to PayFabric, it'll send links for the shoppers to pay through ACH credit debit whenever they're ready based on whatever the terms are, and we'll realize that payment back. And now you're back to again, a digital experience that you're not worried about what went to the neighbor instead of to your address location. And you didn't get that check or whatever may have happened along the way, whatever machine ate it. And so we just see just myriad opportunities to stitch things together and to be able to cut down on waste in the overall chain of operations. Yep, yep. All fantastic points. That's great. Fantastic points. So we called this episode the central hub. Right? And I want to ask you, what does that mean in your world and how does standardizing this data flow help unlock scalability for these businesses that open themselves to it? So we see ourselves very much as a next generation modern step forward in data integration. And that's because most systems are really dealing with getting data point to point. And that's a much more reactive way of dealing with it. With us. Every integration in our marketplace translates and transforms data into our data hub. You can see the data there, you can see every system it's being communicated with. You can see the unique identifier in each system. So you know that in your e commerce site this is product 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. And in the ERP, maybe it's known slightly differently by some other unique identifier. And how that's all happening, you can see it all and the data can come together. You're not trying to every time you, let's say you know, are updating an order, trying to get all that information flowing, iPass.com just needs the new data and it becomes almost an amalgamated source of truth. And even then, if you want to get data from all these key systems to one endpoint, maybe something for analytics or business intelligence and AI system, now you've got all these systems talking to the hub and you just need them to talk to one more thing. And so the ability to unify your data, to unify your commerce operations becomes really, really valuable in not having to think about, oh yeah, if we want to leverage that reporting tool, we're going to now need to hook up six different things. Nope, those, you know, those six things are talking to our hub already. You're just hooking them up to the hub, you know, so there's, there's a lot to be said for that. And look, over time we find that software changes. It's probably changing more rapidly in many cases than ever. And there's key software that you certainly don't want to be changing frequently like your erp, but you want to be able to test new things. You want to be able to again, you know, get that data flowing from the ERP to the marketing stack or you want to, you know, be able to think about, okay, you know, look, we're managing all the categorization of our products and the product attributes and descriptions and all these things and spreadsheets. And it's all cumbersome and it's very manual. And you want to be able to say, look, let's get a product information management system, something like pim, Core, Akeneo. Let's, let's get a piece of software so that our marketers and merchandisers and others can manage the data in one place together and organize it for the different sales channels for maybe different markets that you're selling in, etc. Get all the photos together, get all the content together and you want to be able to then say, okay, well, let's get the raw data out of the ERP into that system and let's get the finished data out to the sales channels. And you know, so it becomes thinking about these things as more of A journey than just a single hop. That's great. That's great. So you don't have to name any names, but can you share a good client example of maybe a manufacturer, distributor, where I pass, help them make a measurable difference in their business? You know, maybe something, you know, that shows what a connected ecosystem can do. There, there's, there's no shortage. One that there was recently a case study with, with Shopware where we working on an organization in the vaping space. So they've got organizations like Vapor Beast, part of a larger organization. The parent company has, you know, over a billion dollar market cap and you know, owns a lot of brands. And so they brought, you know, a lot of brands from an older set of websites to, to newer. And while they were at it, they deployed for the first time a product information management system. Just as I, I was describing moments ago, they spun up a new CRM. They were using an old ERP that's been with the organization for a long time and a Microsoft Dynamics product while planning to eventually move to another erp. And so they looked at the hub and spoke and they looked at what they'd be able to do with iPass.com very favorably because they knew that inherently there was going to be change happening. And they were even thinking about, okay, today certain parts of fulfillment were happening out of the erp, how might they deal more directly with the fulfillment software in the future and so on. And so, you know, their story, like everyone else's, is still being written in many ways. But you know, that was a very interesting launch where they did have some B2C, some direct to consumer sites, but you know, the bulk is B2B and selling to retailers and such. And so the ability to, to move all of that and deploy all this software was, you know, was quite an undertaking and certainly a project that's memorable. That's great. So I want to shift a little bit over to partnerships and collaboration. And so you work really closely with partnerships, like with Groove Commerce to bring all of this vision to life, what makes a great partner relationship work, communication. I think that's where it begins and ends. Right? It's, you know, there are a lot of tech companies out there that focus on, okay, how many leads and how many sales and here's your commissions and if you, if you do enough business, then maybe we'll have real conversations with you. Having grown out of the agency space myself, I think that's backwards. I think that when it comes to situations like this, you know, we're a software Company our subscribers are going to need in most cases, in the vast majority of cases, a team that's going to help them to scope out their software stack and understand what's the source of truth for different types of data, what fields of data need to map, where to build out a project plan, implement, go through qa, user acceptance, testing, whatever we want to think of that quality assurance phase that's going to be there to help them ongoing if there are any data hygiene issues that need to be addressed or new fields of data that need to be mapped or systems that need to be hooked up. And so for us as a company, we look at that understanding that those agencies, SIS, VARs, MSPs, consultancies, those service providers are the key to success. And so right off the bat we look for teams. We seek teams like Groove that are going to be able to provide that level of resource, to reuse the word partner in a different way, to partner with the clients in understanding their needs and having a game plan for success and be able to leverage the technology the same way that Ethan, that your team does with the E commerce platforms, to be able to leverage ipass.com to deliver on those outcomes and to then, you know, not only think of it as a static, okay, it's up and running, it's done and think about the day after and okay, you know, so this is up and running. But what would an ideal look like? What would, you know, what would bring a better conversion rate or you know, better customer success and retention metric or you know, how, what do we, what other software is the business using that might not fit into phase one launch but that eventually, you know, once, once phase one is stable and good, you know, that you think about what's next when the time is right. And so thinking about that as a living, breathing system, you know, we work closely with, with partners, whether it's on training or communication through, you know, Slack channels or you know, all these different things to be able to make sure that we're on the same page. And right from the first projects where getting through that honeymoon together successfully, that everybody's building muscle memory and learning, you know, first project on any platform is always going to be, you know, some new things to learn. And I think that's really where we find success. It's in finding like minded organizations that are really serious about providing long term customer success and that are going to put in the work to scope things successfully, that are going to have solid project management practices and track what they're doing and document things Appropriately and that aren't just about, you know, the race to the bottom on let's do this in an hour and let's hope for the best, you know, and let's keep meeting and, you know, and argue about what needs to happen, but really, again, you know, steady state and things will change in a project, you know, from start to finish in cases, but understanding how to manage that process and, and how to interact well as a group, that's what I really love about you guys. You're super open to questions and conversations and idea pontification. Some of the platforms that we've worked with in the past, when you ask questions, they treat that as a negative. Like, why don't you know that already? I'm like, well, because you're actually doing deployments and releases to your products, sometimes on a weekly or bi weekly or monthly basis. So how would we know all the things that you know about your, your system if we don't ask those questions? Right. And so I just, I love the collaboration with you and there's always, you're always open to, you know, helping us get what we need in order to have a successful, you know, customer, you know, mutual customer experience, you know, overall with this. So I think that's super important. Well, and in software you have to be prepared, especially when you're talking about, you know, in our case, we have a marketplace with so many integrations that the platform has a lot of bells and whistles to be able to achieve a lot of different outcomes. Bugs can happen. You know, it's not often for us. You know, we have, you know, good track record there. But, you know, we need to be communicating if something's not working as described or maybe there's a, maybe there's a typo in documentation somewhere, maybe we can tighten up our documentation somewhere that these are, to your point, it's living, breathing software that's constantly being improved and it's changing. And at the same time that, you know, we know that as our partners go through our training modules and learn the system that, you know, expecting them to remember every last, you know, iota of information that they may have trained on, you know, months ago or what have you, that, you know, we're realistic that we need to be able to collaborate. If we can save a partner from spinning their wheels and chasing their tails, then that's a good day for us. And often it's just a matter of a quick question and answer. And that's where we're happy to jump in with partners into whether scheduled or impromptu calls and solve those sorts of things. And I think that that's really important to the outlook. It's a philosophical choice to be a partnership first organization. It's not just about the technology. It really is something that either people believe in or they don't. Yep, that's great. That's great. So what advice would you give a company that's looking to choose an implementation partner? Oh, that's a tough one. I mean, you know, you do want folks that can get into a groove. That's really important. No, I, I would say, you know, obviously it's nice to get an. We have over 80 agencies and SIS and service partners in our partner program today, and that number continues to, to grow. And some of those are, you know, more agnostic. They're sis that are happy to integrate anything. Some of those are teams that might specialize in a particular ERP or point of sale or CRM or, or E Comm platform. And you know, if that's the linchpin to the project, that's often, you know, a good team to have on call that it's nice to have somebody that understands some of the software in the mix. Ideally, you know, the way we look at it, when you have ipass.com, we are the translator between systems. And so you don't necessarily need to be the penultimate expert in each endpoint. You need to understand how Data flows through iPass.com, but ideally you've got somebody that knows some of the endpoints. It's phenomenal if somebody's building you an E Comm site to be able to have a team that's not only going to focus on building it, but it's going to simultaneously make sure that the data flows are up and running and that they're going to successfully work with the rest of your data stack, with the rest of your tech stack. So that's where teams like specifically Groove stand out and the ability to provide that as a more comprehensive, complete service by combining those areas of expertise versus necessarily trying to pick one team to build the site and one team to integrate it. But inevitably we find that the average user, they will have multiple service providers, that they may have an ERP dealer var on one side that helps them there. And they may even need to call in that team during the project in order to identify what's been customized in the erp, what, what custom tables have been created that a native API may not be able to communicate with to get out in front of those things. Right from the scoping of the project right from the beginning to make sure that everybody understands again, you know, how, how to get to that success point at the end. But, but no, I mean for us it's, it's really about finding a partner that's going to be vested into the overall project and that's going to be with you for the long haul to continue to support. Awesome. So when, when someone's rolling out a new integration, how do you define success for that or how should they think about that success? Is there any kind of metrics or outcomes that you tell people to look for to say that, hey, that's really doing its job outside of like that shit just works? I mean, I think that, that really it is. And works is, you know, it's almost maybe the wrong word because like we recently had a user where I was pointing out internally and to a partner organization involved in the project that, that the user was complaining about all the errors being caught by our system and their own internal team was actually pointing back out that no, no, that that's a good thing because we're putting in bad data and it's caching. You know, so sometimes, you know, what the definition of works is, can be a little bit different between people, but for us it's really, it's really about having a defined project plan, a statement of work there that's, that's about achieving certain outcomes. And maybe. So there's one project I'm thinking about that's wrapping up right now. Where specifically, you know, manufacturer, where ideally, from our perspective, there's. When orders are routed to their erp, it's an Oracle erp, they would automatically go to certain warehouses for fulfillment or certain manufacturing plants for fulfillment for more custom items and such. But the team doesn't have the logic that they can convey for which orders would need to go where today they're handling it manually. And for them, success is getting the order from the E. Comm there and then getting shipping and tracking information back up, et cetera, but doesn't necessarily involve automating which warehouse the order is going to be fulfilled from. And so that's okay, you know, that, that we're already modernizing significantly their business operations and they can come back around to phase two. And so I think really for me what's important is figuring out that phased approach where the organization can, can bite off in pieces and can almost, you know, in technology we often talk about, you know, MVP and you know, how do we get, how do we deliver value as fast as we can and then iterate Rather than try to get stuck in a humongous project. And I'll say that, you know, ideally turning on one, you know, one set of integrations at a time is a great way to be able to do things, get this data flowing with this system, get that working. It's hard to try to replace your erp, your E Comm, add a pim, do all kinds of things at once that you're asking a lot of your internal team as a business. And so we love to see people come up with what is that phased approach and keep defining that, that success. And so is it getting quote requests moving in this direction? Is it dealing with customer specific pricing coming from the ERP to the E Comm? Is it, you know, is there's so many nuances to, you know, where are you going to master the customer and company data? Are you approving customers in the ERP that you know, they need to be approved for terms or as buyers in the first place or are they able to be added through the E commerce website as new customers placing a first order? And we're going to automate bringing that information, bringing that customer and company into the erp. And so, you know, I could rattle off so many of these things. For us it's really figure out, you know, what is, you know, what would be an improvement on where things are at today and then everything else sort of becomes icing on the cake that can be scheduled and try to just keep delivering value in that way. That's great, that's great, that's a great take on all of that. So what are you seeing as the biggest mistakes that people make, the companies make when they're going down this path of connecting their systems? I think that in general, whether we're looking at people that are, you know, writing spaghetti code manually or today we're starting to see it with AI where it's almost it's just an accelerator in many cases to get back to the same old problem of now you've got a bunch of custom code and anytime anything gets goes wrong or needs to be updated, nobody knows up or down about it. It's just accelerating, getting you to that point of failure, being proactive about it, thinking about the long term, the different software systems that you have today and how they would ideally be communicating, thinking about the software systems that you may want in the future, at least the foreseeable future, as far ahead as any of us can see in the tech world and having more of that plan and thinking about how you're going to manage all of that long term rather than thinking about, okay, today I'm going to get this connector from A to B and you know, and you're just going to keep building all this technical debt and you're going to make the total cost of ownership and the maintenance and management harder and harder. That's what we see people often have a hard time with because they're not used to having a better option, they're not used to looking at it differently. And in the E commerce world, I equate this to, you know, folks, that there was a time when you would build a completely custom website from scratch because there was no standardized platform. And then we got into standardized open source and other platforms and you would build on top of that and you'd have to host it and patch it and upgrade it and maintain it. And that's still a great way to go for a lot of use cases. But today there's a larger user base that's going on to SaaS platforms and that's trying to cut down on some of that technical debt and have a more predictable experience. And I think it's a lot about thinking about again back to continuums. How do you get closer to the outcome that you really want, which is not to be a technology company, is not to maintain a bunch of one off software. It's to be able to fill in the blank and the way that we look at the world, it's being able to unify the data and centralize and have that unified experience across the organization and customer base. That's good. So thinking about that, these projects used to just be almost a little bit of a black hole admittedly, or they were the unsexy part of, of the business. And quite frankly I see integrations as a huge part of scalability and opportunities for growth by getting the data where it needs to be in front of the people that need it, when they need it. Right. And so we've seen a huge transformation with AI, you know, over the last few years. How do you think AI is going to continue to affect the IPASS product and where do you see that going for the future? Oh, so many directions. You know, like most technological advances, I think that the market is often wrong about exactly how we'll see it all play out, at least again in the next few years. It's kind of like everybody thought everything was going to be on blockchain. AI is here to stay and it's significant. You know, I can't imagine too many technological advances that'll probably be more significant in the long run. But when I think about it, from the vantage point of ipass.com, we see people moving data to key systems where AI can impact the data, can leverage the data, whether for better reporting or for better outcomes. So like I was mentioning product information management systems earlier, now these PIMs have systems that are going to help to. If you've got a large product catalog and you've got just so much time to write really exciting product descriptions, you can automate that and just approve them. If you're thinking about, you know, the CRMs, they've got components that are going to help figure out which customers need what touch points through what, you know, with what messaging through what medium, how to reach out to that user best. And the marketing stacks do similar things. So I think for us, we see ourselves as pivotal in getting the data where it needs to be in order to get to these kinds of outcomes and experiences. Because trash in, trash out. If you don't have an intelligent system managing those data flows, don't expect good outcomes. But also we're integrating different forms of AI into our own platform. So right now we've got, running in beta internally is something where a lot of our ability to map fields and manage where data is going to go within a system is no code. And so you can just select fields or select some other options there and fill in some blanks. But we've got the ability to script. And so if you need to transform or translate that data in ways, append something, let's say to the product ID number or, you know, or break something apart, validate things in unique ways. We give the ability to use code, but who wants to spend a lot of time doing that? So we've been adding AI where you can tell it what you wanted to script and it'll write it and recommend the code for you right there in our platform so that you can do really, really powerful things with the data as it's in transit. And so there are things like that that we're working on in order to empower people. But we're also trying to do everything in measured steps. And we know that because we're in such an important role and deal with so much data compliance on our side. And this is, you know, first party data, people's customer and transaction data and other things that, you know, we deal with our SOC2 compliance and GDPR and all these different things that we can't just unleash AI on people's data at the same time either. We can make tools available to them to do it and give them the choice to opt in. But we see the ability to leverage some of these things is really instrumental long term. And so us as an amalgamated source of truth, having all of this combined data from all these systems can really lead to some really amazing outcomes in the long run. So I'm excited to see all the things that will be rolling out as it comes out in 2026. But you know, I think it's all about balance. You know, that figuring out that, that balance of which AI systems are winning, which are going to be the most advantageous in the long run. This is like, you know, every other technological revolution that we've seen. Right now there's VC and other money pouring into, you know, more AI companies than any of us can count. And those are not all going to be the big winners. Obviously, you know, the, the big guys in AI, you know, we know OpenAI and you know, and you've got, whether it's, you know, Gemini from Google or Copilot or there's so many systems that are certainly more mainstream and doing well, but there are a lot of other, you know, applications of these things that are just coming into every piece of software that we use as businesses and thinking about again, how can you better leverage that in a more defined way by bringing all the data you need into that system? That's really where we're at. Awesome. Awesome. Well, I always like to ask the same final question of all of our guests. And so for leaders that are considering going down the path of digital transformation, of E commerce transformation, what's one piece of advice that you would give them that they can take away from this conversation today? So I've always found that the questions that often remain unasked have to do with risk analysis. And so not just asking how much is this project going to be, how fast can it launch? Asking what, what are the areas of potential failure? Why could this project be delayed or, or have overruns in some area? What is it that I'm not thinking about? And really, you know, so I think, I mean a, just sitting down with experts and you know, and planning things out and asking the experts, you know, there's a reason that whether we all like to or not, you know, that we go to an accountant for help in accounting or a doctor for medical or you know, or I hope none of us need it anytime soon, but an attorney for legal right. And you know, it's the services industry that you ask the experts because they've seen these things before, they're spending time staying up to date and so sitting down with experts and having the conversations about what do they think and what do they recommend and what would not just this project look like, but what would be the five year plan or maybe three year plan? Because tech is hard to plan out too far in advance in many cases. But again, those things can always amend. But having those conversations and again, coming back to the risk analysis discussion, what is, what are my potential points of failure? You know, often organizations don't think about the internal resources that are going to be needed in a project or the decisions that they're going to need to make and if they change their mind later on, the impact that that's going to have because everybody's just trying to get it done. So I think those are for me, really, really, really important. And, you know, it's surprising how often, you know, you see in the market, you know, things that went to the cheapest bidder and not necessarily the one that was the most knowledgeable and provided the best consultation and provided the best documentation and the best clearest picture of the future together and how that's all going to come together. I can't tell you how many times I've seen projects that went to the cheapest bidder and then came back around to somebody later with less money available because money had been spent and less timeline and, you know, worst kept secret in tech is that, you know, that's often the case. So figuring that out, I think is really, really, really crucial. In our case it's, you know, about bringing all the stakeholders together. So as I was mentioning earlier, you know, if Groove is, is going to be building the site and integrating it, having whatever other teams are involved in the other software, ERP or otherwise, be able to have communication about what's happening on that side and able to provide some clarity if there's anything anomalous. Yeah, that's great. That's great. It's a great viewpoint. You know, I know from, from my standpoint, I don't want GRE Groove to be the cheapest vendor. I want us to be the most thorough vendor. Right. And so, you know, because these projects can go off the rails and we've rescued them on, you know, more than one occasion over the last 20 years. More than one occasion. You'd be surprised so, or maybe you wouldn't be surprised. So today, this is really awesome. I always appreciate talking shop with you, always appreciate seeing you out at events, love hearing about the innovation that, you know, that iPass.com is doing in terms of simplifying this integration process and getting them the systems to actually start talking to each other. So for anybody who wants to learn more, you can head on over to ipass.com or you can connect with Robert directly on LinkedIn. We'll include his LinkedIn link in the episode summary. If you're interested in integrating your systems together, give us a ring here at Groove. Either reach out to me directly on LinkedIn or fill out the contact form on our website. And if you really enjoyed today's episode, please subscribe to our YouTube channel or leave a quick review on Apple Podcasts. It really helps us reach more people in the e commerce community. I'm Ethan Giffen from Groove Commerce. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time on the next episode of E Commerce Masters. Thank you.