Last month I attended the Gartner Application Architecture
Development & Integration Summit. The Keynote and theme throughout the
conference was the Nexus of forces, Social, Cloud, Mobile, and Information (Big
Data). A crucial supporting theme was the necessity for Agile Integration Technologies. The big
integration players, they say, will be “DOA” (dead on arrival) as the
importance of agility spills over from business to technology in a bigger way
than ever.
Agile integration is all about communicating across all
kinds of endpoints in all kinds of formats with all kinds of integration
patterns, and all adjusted to make sense together. It is about getting it in
place quickly and it’s about integration that adapts to the changing
environment, devices, and fast pace business changes. The archaic picture of
integration- making data move from one place to another- simply won’t do the
trick.
Most integration products focus only on Social Media OR On-Premise OR Cloud OR mobile OR Big
Data. They tend to be based on a model of SOA OR ETL, OR
Data Virtualization, OR
Messaging Bus. This means that you need to have multiple integration products,
each handling its own specialty. Even
with the big integration players, who would blatantly use AND instead of OR,
you are jumping from one environment to another, since their claim to breadth
comes largely from acquisition. Their “AND”
consists of the camouflage duct tape and baling wire utilities provided. Suppose you have need for an integration
pattern that combines ETL, Cloud, Mobile, and Data Virtualization?
It’s really unfathomable that you could tie integration from multiple
platforms together in a way that anyone could call “Agile.”
What does agile integration really mean to your business and
your tech team? It means being able to
support agile decisions and an agile enterprise, with significantly less
resources and at a lower cost.
Here are some requirements to look for to assess the agility
of an integration product, and examples:
1)
Agility requires: Reusability
Reusable connections,
business logic, schemas… most everything.
2)
Agility requires: Rapid
time-to-value
Generate
integration definitions, test them, and deploy quickly to begin getting immediate
business benefit
3)
Agility requires: Instantly
adapting to changing requirements
Add a
new source, change the business rules, move some data to cache, and anything
else in the configuration must be easily changed in minutes. Deploy
to cloud when needed, or as Mobile accessible integration
4)
Agility requires: Scaling
up or down quickly and easily
Fast-growing businesses need
scaling up for growth or acquisition, and scaling down as needed for
distributed use
5)
Agility requires: Connectivity to Everything
Single
platform connects and reuses integration definitions for electronic
instruments, enterprise ERPs, cloud apps, spreadsheets, relational databases,
b2b standards, etc.
6)
Agility requires: Simple
construction of Complex Integration Patterns
Add
caching, data synchronization, or ETL to an on-demand data virtualization with
write-back.
7)
Agility requires: Deploying
integration logic multiple ways
One Button Deployment and Hosting of Data Virtualization as web service, REST, ODBC, JDBC, OData,
Ado.net connection string, SharePoint BDC/BCS etc.
8)
Agility requires: Single
product; Single platform.
No
jumping in and out of multiple environments and trying to make them work
together
9)
Agility requires: Completely
metadata driven; Single Metadata Stack
Means
external programming is reduced to nothing; heavy reusability; visibility of
the state across the whole integration at any time
10)
Agility requires: Configured,
not coded.
Enough
said.
Agility means: Minimal Tech Debt. All of these points greatly reduce tech debt
by virtue of agility. It just doesn’t get
any better than that.
Stone Bond’s Enterprise Enabler® is THE
Agile Integration Software.