To gather insights on the state of application and data integration, we spoke with 18 executives from 15 companies who are involved in the integration of applications and data.

Here’s who we talked to:

Shawn Ryan, V.P. Marketing Digital as a Service, Axway | Kurt Collins, Director of Technology Evangelism and Partnership, Built.io | Thomas Hooker, V.P. of Marketing, CollabNet | Piyush Mehta, CEO, Data Dynamics | Daniel Graves, VP of Product Management, Delphix | Samer Fallouh, V.P. of Engineering, and Andrew Turner, Senior Solutions Engineer, Dialexa | Andrew Leigh, V.P. of Marketing and Alliances, Jitterbit | Trevor Hellebuyck, CTO, Metalogix | Mike Stowe, Developer Relations Manager, MuleSoft | Zeev Avidan, V.P. Product Management, Open Legacy | Sean Bowen, CEO, Gordon McKinney, Senior Solution Architect, Ross Garrett, Product Marketing, Push Technology | Joan Wrabetz, CTO, Quali | Razi Sharir, V.P. of Products, Robin Systems | Girish Pancha, CEO, StreamSets | Bob Brodie, CTO, SUMOHeavy |

And here’s what they told us when we asked them, "What are your thoughts on microservices? Concept, current state, future?" 

• A lot of confusion with APIs and digital services. More of a develop and deploy pattern – able to create services that do specific things unrelated to other things. Ability for Agile and continuous development.
• Microservices are core to our strategy. They provide us with the ability to deliver end-to-end solutions via applications. We provide a black box service scan for personally identifiable information to develop governance and enhance the application.
• Microservices are a huge part of our pipeline. While Flow is about APIs, the APIs are all tied to microservices (like GitHub). This will create a big picture ecosystem.
• Our own microservices are exposed to Rest APIs with the ability to move from host A to B with everything continuing to work.
• Microservices will continue to grow in popularity for folks building their own products, not for Open Source platforms. Platforms need to be easy to get up and running.
• Microservices are part or our present and future. SOA is dead. Microservices are needed for rapid deployment. Microservices are more than a concept, they are in use to scale and maintain better. Microservices come with their own set of complications and challenges. A lot of buzz and hype – not a silver bullet. There’s a continuum across application architecture not just one or two options – a myriad of architectures.
• Microservices are definitely more than just a concept and are in use today solving real problems of scale and maintainability. However, microservices do come with their own set of challenges and tradeoffs and are not the best choice for every scenario. Consider your use case and choose the architecture that best solves the needs of your product. Application Continuum for Distributed Systems – There’s a continuum between monolith applications and microservices that ranges from unstructured single applications to modular applications with distinct components to separate microservices. Each architecture within the continuum has its own set of pros and cons, so choose the one that best fits your application’s needs.
• We use microservices internally and in some of the enterprises we work with. There’s not a dramatic push/ Redefining application delivery will play an important role in future as Cisco pieces together microservices to meet the custom needs of clients.
• Not today. We’re focused on software management. None of our clients are using microservices.
• Microservices with reactive data layers. Decouple monolithic systems to an app. Layer sits on top microservices as a controller (reactive data layer). Microservices is becoming a massive movement among the Fortune and Footsie 100 who are investing heavily. There’s a difference between best practice and implementation promoting an event driven architecture and yet everyone keeps using ACP. See a lot of HTTP most of the people still using according to Ann Thomas at Gartner. Need to keep promoting the real-time streaming model – lots of little services are good for data. People aren’t talking about discovery and failover. Apps do subscribe to topics in the tree. A single stopping pint for the app to connect.
• 1) It’s the architecture we have for our own cloud development first model. 2) Arrow all about NodeJS and microservices. Run as a microservice and then plugged in to build APIs or narrow existing APIs – run as microservices.
• We use microservices. We do not see our global Fortune 100 clients using them as much. They’re trying to build a Docker pilot.
• 1) Microservices is a hot trend right now. It is not about any one technology or about turning everybody in your company into a 24/7 DevOps team but rather encourages decentralized technology development. Microservices allow small teams within the business to self-serve new technology projects and initiatives based on their own areas of expertise. 2) A lot of attention and energy have been invested in recognizing the need for highly efficient, automated operational control for microservices: you need to streamline how services are deployed, tested, launched, tracked and rolled back. However, an equally important, yet often under-appreciated, pillar of success is the application programming interface (API), which specifies how software components should interact. They already play a play a critical role to increasing the pace of digital transformation. 3) According to a recent survey from the MuleSoft Connectivity Benchmark Report, 91 percent of organizations have an API strategy in place or plan to by the end of 2016. Out of those respondents, more than half are leveraging APIs to increase agility and enable business teams to self-serve IT. In a world of even narrower-scoped, faster and more independently-evolving services, APIs -- which define and constrain the requirements and dependencies between services -- play an even more important role in unlocking agility.
• 1) We use microservices extensively in our own product. 2) Good next generation concept following in the lines of componentization, object oriented, SOA, etc. 3) For new projects, they are a common architectural choice. 4) The challenge in the integration world is that you have to get all the generations to work together. We have customers with mainframes, client server, packaged ERP applications, and new microservices based apps all at the same time. 5) Delphix is helping our customers move to a microservices-based architecture as we can serve data for testing subsets of applications. As our clients move to a world in which they test their services in containers, we can serve up near-instant set of data required for the testing of the unique components.

Are you and your company using microservices?