CloudBlue Connect’s new features aid businesses in streamlining and automating more processes

CloudBlue, an Ingram Micro business, announced the newest update to CloudBlue Connect, a unique catalog and channel automation platform.

With the accelerated proliferation of products, channels, marketplaces and customers, CloudBlue helps businesses perform for today’s business goals and simultaneously transform for tomorrow’s opportunities by enabling speed to market and revenue for all products, across all channels.

“The latest version of CloudBlue Connect gives customers even greater operational efficiency and scalability to more easily grow their businesses,” said Tarik Faouzi, vice president of CloudBlue. “Our core mission is to help customers accelerate their time to market and revenue through increased business automation and continuous innovation.”

The CloudBlue Connect release (version 19) features an out-of-the-box plugin on the Zapier platform, a web-based process automation platform. This offers providers and their vendors greater extensibility to communicate and automate processes with thousands of applications with no development effort—unlocking unlimited opportunities to new types of integrations.

Another key feature is the new, highly requested Subscription module, which enables providers and their vendors to view their respective recurring subscriptions from a consolidated pane.

Additionally, CloudBlue Connect can now trigger automated billing requests for recurring subscriptions at renewal times, which is a benefit for organizations with legacy commerce systems incapable of initiating these recurring billing requests.

Besides the Zapier plugin and Subscription module, these are other new features:

• Expanded compatibility with usage-based products: The ability to add products that require complex usage reporting.
• Shopping cart validation and reservation: Automatically validate the availability of a product quantity and reservations before checkout.
• Unified product definition: Vendors can more specifically define products from one interface, and providers can find all product-related information in one place.
• Extended SKU definition: Vendors can create a detailed SKU hierarchy so that providers can better understand their portfolio for clearer bundling and upselling and cross-selling paths.

“We developed these enhancements as part of our long-term strategy for CloudBlue Connect and as a response to our customer feedback,” Faouzi said.

“With businesses today being impacted by the current climate and the need for greater operational flexibility, our cloud and digital capabilities enable companies to look beyond the traditional ways of working to work from anywhere in the most efficient manner possible.”

Organizations lose 20% to 30% of revenue every year due to inefficient processes, according to market research firm IDC. CloudBlue solves the challenges businesses face in the era of proliferation with efficient solutions that get customers to market faster without significant investments and the sacrifice of revenue.