Technology Integration
The Alliance for Winery Solutions has given the power back to each winery which enables them to select the best service and provider for each of their own specific needs. Now, wineries can have confidence when they are building their set of business tools. They will know that the services from different providers will all communicate seamlessly. Wineries can add or discontinue services one at a time or all at once without any large expense or risk. Wineries no longer are forced to buy expensive solutions with long term contracts. Wineries can now take back their power to address their own unique business needs.
Ease of Setup and Operation
Most of the integration is setup by checking a checkbox or selecting an option from a list. Ongoing operation of the interfaces can be as easy as pressing a button to move data between systems. In some cases, these interfaces have automated so they automatically occur on a schedule, without any winery staff interaction.
This technology alliance is a work-in-progress, and as such, these interfaces continue to be refined and made easier to use. Depending on where you choose to house your "system of record" data, and which systems and components are in place at your winery, the interface may currently be a data file that is transferred between systems, however as this alliance evolves it will become more streamlined.
Under the Hood -- the Technology that Makes it Easy to Use
The founding companies have defined a common set of interface specifications that allow data to move between the systems. The interfaces have been defined using the Extensible Markup Language (XML), which is structured, tag-based method of defining data elements. This data then moves between systems in a secure, encrypted method over the Internet, using industry standards of SOAP over HTTPS.