Tech Lover 9

Every now and then someone comes along with a bold idea and takes a leap of faith that really pays off. That’s exactly what happened with Paul Stamas. Paul is the vice president of Information Technology for Mohawk, an 80-year-old, family owned company and the largest privately owned manufacturer of fine papers and envelopes for commercial and digital printing.

The situation was this: The Internet, digitization, mobile computing, environmental awareness, energy costs and global competition were culminating into the perfect storm, threatening paper manufacturers of all sizes on every front. Mohawk’s CEO knew the company needed to transform itself fast or die.

To survive, Mohawk would need to claim a leadership position in the emerging digital web-to-print industry. This would require the company to become incredibly agile to be able to quickly respond to new opportunities and technology shifts. Mohawk would also need to broaden its offerings beyond paper and envelopes to include product bundles, digital products and services to drive demand for its high-end paper products. This shift would expand its sales channel from strictly selling to paper distributors to also selling direct to consumers. It would mean partnering with other companies, making some acquisitions and embracing eCommerce. Paul estimated the changes required to Mohawk’s IT infrastructure to support the new business model would cost over a million dollars – more money than the company was willing to invest in a traditional enterprise-class integration solution.

Paul looked to the cloud and had a vision. 

He wanted to benefit from an enterprise-class integration platform, without having to buy one. Paul also wanted to figure out a way to leverage the cloud as an integration platform for Mohawk’s business processes. So, he initiated an industry-academic partnership between Mohawk, Liaison Technologies and Syracuse University to design and implement an “integration-in-the-cloud” project as part of his doctoral studies at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse. For its role in the project, Liaison, an integration cloud services brokerage, would build a plug-and-play, service-oriented architecture (SOA) that would give Mohawk the business process agility it would need to meet its transformation objectives.

The project was a stunning success.

With Liaison’s help, Mohawk was selling its products on Amazon.com within a few weeks of deciding to move to cloud computing and at a huge cost savings over trying to do everything itself.

But, that was only the beginning.

Liaison’s integration brokerage services allowed Mohawk to grow from 300 paper distribution customers to over 30,000 customers in just a few months, aided through its new partnerships, acquisitions and eCommerce site, for very little cost.

The Liaison platform is a hub that allows Mohawk to build new business models by knitting together business processes. This any-to-any integration platform connects on-premise application-to-application integration, on-premise-to-cloud integration and cloud-to-cloud integration. As a result, Mohawk’s B2B transactions seamlessly flow from hundreds of trading partners to its on-premise operation systems, resulting in more timely and accurate information and eliminating the requirement of staff to manually process transactions.

The Liaison integration platform-as-a-service, or iPaaS, also enables Mohawk to rapidly on-board new suppliers, outsourced manufacturers and third-party logistics providers to offer new bundles of products and services and to extend the reach of delivery. Moreover, it allows Mohawk to experiment with new cloud services, data-as-a-service offerings and new business processes without the risk.

Instead of the “big bang” approach to installing a million dollar middleware system, Mohawk is taking the evolutionary path, where it adds new capabilities when it needs them very inexpensively.
Today, Mohawk is weaving together and tapping into a variety of cloud services, eCommerce sites and its own web services, as well as connecting with all of its B2B and B2C customers, suppliers, outsourced manufacturing partners, third-party logistics providers and financial institutions, through the Liaison business process hub. Although it may sound complicated, Paul says it’s not. It’s all managed though a single, secure connection between Mohawk and Liaison. This completely releases Mohawk from the technicalities of running such a complex integration scheme. While Liaison handles the technical nuts and bolts, the Mohawk IT team focuses on building its business process value systems.

The industry has taken notice of Paul’s vision and Mohawk and Liaison’s collaborative accomplishments. Paul won SearchCIO-Midmarket.com’s 2012 Technological Advancement Award for his visionary cloud strategy, and Mohawk was named by CIO magazine as a 2012 CIO 100 Award recipient as “one of 100 innovative organizations that use IT effectively to create business value.”
The Mohawk-Liaison cloud partnership also has been cited by Gartner, Deloitte and InfoTrends as lessons in cloud services brokerages, hyper-hybrid clouds and business transformation.