Tightly-coupled vs Loosely-coupled

I read a fantastic blog on the SAP blog site by Ralph Oliveira. It is all about moving your SAP Business One on-premises solution to cloud. Click here to read the blog by Ralph.

One of the big strengths of SAP Business One is you can deploy it many ways. From hosted on AWS to on-premises on your own server. When deploying an ERP there are times when you need an Add On solution from the ecosystem such as The RIC Group's WMS.

Typical on-premises solutions are what is called tightly-coupled. They are normally interfacing with SAP Business One using the Data Interface (DI) and User Interface (UI) API's. To take some of these solutions to the cloud there are many considerations needed such as resources, security, ports, and can you install other software onto this environment. This becomes very noticeable when you want to install your software on an AWS environment which has many layers of security.

When you are moving to a cloud solution then you need to look at ecosystem for the loosely-coupled approach such as The RIC Group's WMS. Our WMS will allow you to deploy the ERP such as SAP Business One in any environment and our WMS will be able to interface with it using the service layer. This is also true with MYOB Advanced, which runs in the AWS servers in Sydney, and your Add on solution needs to communicate using the REST API. With SAP Business One the service layer is the REST API.

A huge benefit of this approach is providing our customers the ability to deploy new features without changing anything in the ERP such as SAP Business One. When you look into the future and see that there is machine learning, IoT and blockchain, then to secure the future of your business implementing loosely-coupled solutions with your ERP is the right way.
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