Enterprise Integration needs more Agility
IDC

Enterprise Integration needs more Agility

Enterprise integration challenges are changing. Several IT trends like the emergence of cloud-based services, the explosion of channels to reach customers and the need to enable different types of apps including mobile or IoT require integration approaches to be more agile. Centralized ESBs are more and more becoming heavyweight monoliths themselves. They very often represent a bottleneck that are far too slow to react to new integration demands due to rapidly changing market conditions.

As an answer we propose the Agile Integration vision. This vision was conceived by Red Hat over a couple of months by analyzing trends, interviewing people and collaborating with other players in the market. It is an abstract and product independent vision, which does not lock-in customers in any way.

The power of this vision is that it addresses typical integration challenges with an architectural approach centered around application programming interfaces (APIs) and API Management. Agile Integration combines agile methods and practices with specific IT technologies for the purpose of rapidly integrating applications and data, using platforms particularly suited for flexible, adaptive and reusable solutions.

At its core Agile Integration describes three pillars:

  1. Distributed Integration
  2. Containers
  3. APIs and API Management

Each pillar provides specific benefits in terms of business capabilities: Distributed Integration results in greater flexibility, Containers lead to the ability to scale better, and managed APIs offer re-usability and hence increased speed.

The three pillars are central but reside on a solid basis that also covers aspects like culture, processes, tools and automation that allow agile practices to be deployed successfully. As depicted in the figure below, the vision can also be extended by further capabilities based on customer demand such as building enterprise applications, enabling mobile or IoT apps, supporting business process management and allowing effective data management and security.

The value of Red Hat’s Agile Integration vision is also supported by a recent study by IDC, which confirms that today’s cloud-enabled enterprises face different integration challenges that must be addressed in much more agile way. One of the findings of IDC is that organizations will spread new cloud spending across all tiers of the cloud, with 32% of new spending on SaaS applications. IDC suggests a similar concept as outlined by Red Hat’s Agile Integration vision.

To find out more, get the IDC InfoBrief Agile Integration for today's cloud-enabled enterprise from here:

IDC InfoBrief

Paul Hinz

Ex-USAF, Sun Microsystems, Red Hat, CEO, CMO, Board Member

6y

Great post Manfred - is there a thought on how the existing integration competency center fits in to the move to an agile integration approach?

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