Hybrid Integration Best Practices

It’s clear that rethinking your integration stack is becoming more and more urgent.

Back in the year 2000, we saw the emergence of service-oriented architecture (SOA), with the rise of enterprise application integration (EAI) and the enterprise service bus (ESB). These areas of expertise exploded and gave people like me a lot of work until easily 2012, when API management platforms and more modestly iPaaS platforms had started to grow their adoption. At the same time, agility, the cloud, and the rise of “citizen-x” (citizen developer, data citizen, and so on) have reshaped IT, sometimes with 10-year-old technologies. Meanwhile, the older integration stack is often perceived as obsolete, if not outright useless. (Of course, API management is not included in these statements.)

In this changing context, the concept of the Hybrid Integration Platform (HIP) has emerged. A recent survey from Axway found that 45% of respondents have implemented (or are implementing) a hybrid integration platform to close the gap between new and traditional integrations. Why? According to the survey, the primary factor driving adoption is the need to innovate faster to keep up with agile, cloud-native start-ups.

Since the “winter” of integration, the IT world has evolved, and there is an urgent need to bring more value, more quickly, to new infrastructures and to a relatively new audience. This is the promise of HIP — to be able to connect an increasingly hybrid world more quickly. It thus becomes necessary:

• To build integration flows in a few days rather than a few weeks or months,
• To no longer be blocked by the firewall,
• To embrace both the “do-it-yourself” and the collaborative way of work,
• To have all profiles concerned directly or indirectly by integration around the same table and the same integration stack,
• To integrate Cloud and on-premise, and do this in an easy way whatever the integration topology,
• To discuss new use cases around IoT and AI, and
• To activate and blend together the different architecture strategies (services, events, and data).

This multi-dimensional complexity requires the ability to address all these points, with a combination of possibilities that seems infinite. It is therefore a question of managing this complexity through a modular and integrated platform logic so that we will not have to separately integrate each new business need. In this manner, we can produce integrations as easily as building with Lego toys.

This is how it is possible to integrate the data from a company’s data lake with a new SaaS application, an IoT management brick, and an old on-premise database, very simply and quickly (in less than a week), with just a few clicks. It’s also possible to share these integration capabilities with integration specialists as well as end users who would like to make flows themselves, with a solution like Microsoft Flow or Zapier.

This is a preview of the Hybrid Integration Best Practices Refcard. To read the entire Refcard, please download the PDF from the link above.