So we're near the end of the road. And you could have many, many, many cloud based systems in your business as you start adding complexity and functions and saying I need this solution and that solution. And it starts to be its own problem, if you think about it, because you have the same information multiple places, or you have system a that could do something for you, if it knew about what it happened in system B. And the point to the information technology, including the stuff on the cloud is not to give you manual work to do, although you will end up doing some of that for some things. It's to give you the ability to automate to scale up so that repetitive tasks, repetitive processes, hopefully, can be handled by the machinery and not by you on cloud based systems really tended to hit the market.

First as things used by human beings, you know, I'm going to go to a website and do these things with this information. Now I'm going to call it a web app, or I forget, we call them a one point hosted, hosted system, something like that. Leave that aside, historical. I mentioned API's application programming interfaces, and the importance of evaluating whether a potential solution or potential business problem has an API. Now I want to sort of bring that full circle and talk about what I think it's fairly early generation, but nonetheless, important integration between cloud systems that's starting to show up on the market. There's essentially two ways to two ways to think of this at this point.

One is, does does cloud app a cloud system a taught to cloud system be really on that direct linkage can matter a whole bunch. And it's probably one of the one one of the things that you want to evaluate for core internal systems. I'll give you an example. I keep using him as an example because I can do a lot of stuff. Well, we use fresh books for invoicing, as I mentioned, fresh books. And I don't know if they still do this, because I think they're starting to edge into the space of being competitors, fresh books.

When I was evaluating zero, the online accounting platform had an integration and API level integration that went two ways. And I believe it was mainly customer records stuff, but I could go get my freshbooks ID and secret key in a nutshell, and tell zero about it and vice versa. So if I put it in new customer in fresh books, bam, customer records in 05. Put a new customer zero, bam, new customer record in fresh books. If those two still don't talk anymore, and this does happen, companies do say, well, it's working. But we've evolved our technology.

And we haven't caught up with that integration or something like that yet, be be prepared for that. But when you're looking through the the API integrations list for a cloud platform, look and see if other systems are using or considering are on that list. Because if they are, that's the beginning of the automation to make your life a whole bunch easier. On at the risk of stating the really obvious one for accounting, possibly invoicing, payment gateway, you definitely want to look at your bank, as a cloud based system and say, Can I get what I need in the way of financial information probably out of my bank, relatively little interest. To my bank, a lot of those as I described earlier, hacks that pretend to be you logging in, but that's really not necessarily your problem. Can system a to system B?

Directly? That's the question I'm posing. Where that starts to get a little bit hairy. at scale, is this sort of round robin problem if you if you said freshbooks integrates with zero, and zero integrates with system x. And system x integrates with fresh books, and oh, shoot, wait a minute. Now I gotta bring the fourth one into the mix.

What am I gonna do? I have each of them talking to each of the others. Do I end up with duplication? Or do I end up with sort of the dog chasing his tail phenomenon, he can get a little hard to maintain, logically so so you got to be selective about this. Don't turn on integration, because it's cool. Turn it on because it solves some sort of problem for you.

Takes some sort of work off your plate. The other thing is, as I said, this is fairly early days, but man, I gotta say, as a as a geek as a tech guy. I think this is just incredibly exciting. There are at least a couple of platforms probably more that I don't know about, that are in the core business of being really good at taking info from system a based on things happening and putting it in system B and vice versa. The one I'm going to talk about it later because it's the one I'm most familiar with. Right now.

I don't know if it's pronounced Zapier or Zapier EA, but Zapier is a cloud integration platform. And what Zapier a there's a multiplier effect is Zapier. Zapier says yeah, we know how to we know how to talk to fresh books. We know how to watch for certain things happening and get information out of fresh books. Okay, that's cool. Hey, guess what we've also we've also written some integration, some API intelligence with podio.

So if you happen to use fresh books and you happen to use podio, there are things that we can watch for and fresh books and things that we can transfer over to podio. And vice versa, things we can watch for in podio and things that we can transfer over to freshbooks. Great, wonderful. Now we bring system x in to the next again, whatever that happens to be. And this is where Zapier is going to get geometrically more powerful as they grow. They don't need to write a system extra fresh books, integration, they don't need to write a system X to podio integration they need to say well once we figured out how to work with system x, we already know how to do this set of things between podio so we can do system x podio.

We know how to do this sort of things with fresh books. We've got a system next to fresh books. So yay, isn't that wonderful? Let me show you some of the bits. This is the front door of freshbooks. Look at that works with 200 web servers, sorry, this is the front door to Zapier, a 200 web services and counting.

And it says they're the way they describe it is to automate tasks between online services. Actually, I love this quote, because this is utterly, utterly true. And this is the one reason I'm so enthusiastic about it, I was going to pay a developer to make two services, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. If he thought he was going to get away with that, for $1,000. What would happen is a month later, two months later, six months later, two years later, he'd be paying a developer to continue to fix that thing that's critical to his company work. And he'd actually probably never stopped paying the developer to do that because it'd be critical to his work.

It would become probably a viable dependency. Funny thing for a technology guy to say, but if you're a small to medium sized business, you probably should stay a mile away from custom software development. Because it's always more complicated than you thought. It's always more expensive than you thought. And on a lifespan basis is hardly ever stops. So here's, here's jappy, a in action on logged in, and it's a from this to that, based on this event to accomplish this other kind of action.

So crazy, ridiculous, fascinating list. I'll pick on podio. Again, since I got podio, nurse as well, okay, what are my triggers in podio, let's say new, whatever new tasks, I'm going to give Fred a task. And when I give Fred a task, I actually want to put a record in the CRM system to match because Fred tends to watch the CRM system dumb to do that kind of redundancy and just using it as an example, from this to this based on this kind of action, I'll give you a different example something that I actually already used the that I use daily as a matter of fact, the subscription management platform recurly that we use for part of our business when someone subscribes new account, that's the trigger. I want to know about it. And I actually don't like checking email.

I think email is a big pain in the patootie a lot of the time. So I said, You know what, when someone fires up a new account, I want you to send me a text message. recurly doesn't have text notification. It's not built in. Their email notification is a little bit on the quiet side. But with with Zapier sitting there watching the thing, doesn't matter to me.

Yappi a Zapier sorry if I'm mispronouncing it, guys, um, runs on a schedule every 15 minutes It's, it does checks the things that it's scheduled to check. And each time it actually does an action. Oh, there's a new recurly subscription, let's send a text that decrements the number of tasks that are allocated for a month. And as you can see, you can ramp that number up pretty pretty fast and pretty high. You can kick the tires with a free account, which is characteristic of cloud based services, but it's particularly particularly useful to get a feel for how this can make your life easier. So this is a fruit basket of triggers that we've got running notifications on this and integrations between that.

This is database to text or telephone, this is subscription into podio. This is credit card charge on stripe. Over to notification system. I was running on my phone. I think that actually wasn't too happy with that, I may have to change that. And on and on.

And with 200 different 200 different platforms, like I said, they're going to go up geometrically, every one of them they add, it's the kind of information is suitable, might go to the other 199 that they've already got in place. This is a phenomenal thing they're doing. I know the company got funded up, who I hope they grow, I hope they succeed. We need stuff like that. There is what I would call a competitor or a comparative service. This is one I'm aware of.

There may be others. It does it. I kicked the tires on this. I found it quite comparable. I was already using zappy. A, I liked it.

They covered some of the key services that were important to our business. It does it guys had a couple of services that I didn't see over there, but I don't need two of them. Two of them would be to look at to two minutes. I really don't need that for the time being. If you do implement something like this, it behooves you to keep track of what's running because in a sense, you're paying for it. And it behooves you to think it through and give it test data and make sure it's something you really need running.

That being said, there are things I don't worry about at night, and I don't take responsibility for in terms of information transfer, because I know Zapier is sitting there running and watching for it. We actually recently implemented a task management just to keep our virtual company coordinated, called Trello. Very cool. looks kind of like this right? I'm gonna move this from here to here. And I set a simple Zapier trigger on the last column, which his stuff gets done.

And all it does is puts the person's name and the task back Over in podio, in that social media stream that we all watch all the time, it's a nice endorphin buzz. To see those got done things popping up as people get through their list, I think it's some of the best reinforcement of productivity that we thrown into our virtual workplace for quite a stretch. Trello by itself sort of does that. But I don't want to watch this thing all day, and neither does anybody else on the team. Everyone is in the habit of having podio running. So zappy a, let us take the Trello stuff and pipe it into podio without writing software, without having to have machinery servers, and all of that other stuff running.

The fact that they've got an infrastructure that's there seven by 24. Let's help doing all this work. That's a really big deal. I mean, if you said Well, I can do stuff like that myself. I'll write Excel macro. Yeah, maybe but that means you've got to have a machine that's going to sit there reliably running your Excel macro.

All the time to do the job. So it's exciting as heck that this kind of stuff is showing up in the world and I expect it to continue to, to mushroom and to flourish as more things are happening on the cloud, the soda call it the consumer version of Zapier, if you will, that's worth knowing about is IFTTT, If This Then That. I don't run many IFTTT t things, but it's the same kind of watch stuff, make conditional decisions. do other stuff with it. I could watch I could set up an AI ftt t that said, like this one text me the weather every morning I could set up an IFTTT that says if an old guitar shows up on Craigslist, send me an email. I was watching For a guitar amp to go for sale on the local Craigslist board for my son and I said, if you see a guitar app matching the Apollo expects, send me an email about an IFTTT that they're running and I didn't have to monitor it myself.

You could set up news alerts on on your customers, for example, and piping through IFTTT sort of manage it that way. So some of the same sense of doing stuff for you sitting there in the cloud constantly doing work. This is, as I said, a bit more. Consumer centric Zapier. It does it really designed a bit more to integrate business services together. But as you move your technology infrastructure pieces to the cloud, a platform like this is a real asset.

I've looked at doing some zappy A to internal systems integration. We don't actually have any business critical systems that run on machines within the company. Aside from apps that have to run on machines here like, like Adobe Adobe's Creative Suite, I'm not running that in the cloud, at least not not yet on a reliable fixed IP address is almost a requirement. So that's going to tend to rule out even if I wanted to run such and such on my on my desktop computer, it has to be on all the time. It has to have a public IP address, and it has to be open enough to talk to Zapier to be useful. So I think the domain of use for Zapier and things like it is likely to remain between cloud systems for the time being zappy.

A does have hooks into my sequel, which is the open source relational database that I mentioned in a previous section. If you've got a my sequel box, sitting out there doing work for you, you probably have my sequel service running on a website. hosting package most of them do. If you can solve the reliable IP addresses problem from both sides, in theory, you could have zap EA sticking stuff in that SQL database. As I said, if you end up using the word database, a whole bunch in trying to solve your business problems, pause and go look for a commercial solution where there's some smart developers trying to help you with the problem all the way along. database program is not for the faint of heart.

So that's it cloud integration. wonderful story only gonna get better. I should footnote that it's very cool that mobile is part of this picture. You saw a trigger I had going from I forget what through Twilio, which I mentioned earlier, Twilio being sort of telephony platform from and for the internet. I run stuff through Twilio to send texts. I could run something through Twilio to say make a phone call.

I could get a it would be pretty easy. In fact, I doubt it would take 15 minutes to say when someone subscribes, call their number and play a pre recorded message from me saying thanks very much for subscribing, we'll get right on the job. Like that's the kind of integration you could do that used to be science fiction. So this stuff is pretty fun. You've got to admit enjoy, bye