Modernizing your business sounds exciting, maybe even necessary, but also scary. Does it mean replacing all the things you have today? Things which you are both comfortable with, but also likely frustrated by. The goal is to transform your business to become more agile. Not everything you have is broken. It just needs to be used more effectively. Where something is broken – fix it. If it works keep it. And it’s probably a good time to stand back and figure where you want to make improvements, and maybe what you want to be able to do afterwards. Not everything you need to change is technology-based. There will be many processes that you might want to revisit as part of this modernization. Additionally, the people in your organization will also need to see what you are trying to achieve and to participate to enact the changes.
What are businesses trying to overcome and change? Applications and systems need to connect and to access and exchange data to drive business activities. This connectivity is described as integration. Today any integrated IT infrastructure is likely already highly inter-connected to ensure the rapid and secure movement of data to power their business activities. But as businesses look to build new or replace applications to enhance their existing operations or to respond to new and changing business opportunities, they may find their existing architecture and integration approach slows them down, or even prevents them from making changes faster or doing business in new ways.
Their existing integrations might be too interconnected and tightly-coupled, with any change or version update at all impacting too many other systems, and requiring months or years of testing.
Or perhaps the current way of building and deploying integrations is too slow, with too many manual steps and key staff always pressured by competing priorities. This slows down the ability of the business to add new applications and integrate them quickly to the rest of their business.
Even if spending was available to add new skilled resources to the team, additional people would not necessarily make a material difference to how quickly new integration deployments could be achieved due to the systemic inefficiencies in the implementation. The extra cost would also be hard to justify with budgets mostly allocated to business unit projects rather than integration teams.
Instead, what is needed is to approach integration in a new way. How to achieve many of the same integration outcomes without a lot of the same overheads and complexity? And how to build and deploy brand new applications and capabilities integrated seamlessly, securely, and rapidly to the rest of the business? To do this you need to modernize your integrations. You might think how do I get started? Just as if you were looking to cross a river. You want to get to the other side. But how?
Imagine integrations that were simple to build, and not just easy to deploy, but with updates that can be added to your CI/CD pipeline. Where any integration, using any style of integration, can be deployed using the same skills and techniques, to a runtime environment that is the same wherever it is deployed. A runtime environment that would be the same on-premises, or in the cloud. An environment that can scale up and down automatically with each component scaling up and down individually rather than the whole environment. Integration environments which are simple to update, decoupled from each other and from the deployed infrastructure, and migrate without impacting up-time. And integrations that are individually deployable, scalable and can operate and be updated without impacting any other integration deployment or application.
Line of business application teams can request new integrations, and even design them without coding and without waiting for individual help from the integration specialists. And integration specialists can spend their time adding value, solving complex issues or enhancing the wider infrastructure instead of churning through multiple repeated requests and following time-consuming resource-intensive step-by-step processes. Existing integration deployments can still provide the same value and capabilities by connecting and moving data, but the complexity of configuration, deployment and operation can be greatly reduced.
This modern approach to integration is the value proposition behind IBM Cloud Pak for Integration. The most complete set of integration capabilities, all engineered and optimized for cloud-native container deployment, built to exploit the resiliency and scalability of the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, deployed on-premises or on public cloud. All integration components are deployed using the same approach, through Kubernetes Operators, to simplify, automate and provision without manual intervention.
While the deployment and management might be designed for cloud-native environments and requirements, the functions are going to be familiar to many customers. And your business will see these familiar, and easy to adopt steps as achievable and accessible. Like stepping stones helping you to cross the river. You can move forward, without getting into difficulties, and without losing what you already have.
If deploying new IBM MQ instances to provide assured once-and-once-only message delivery with transaction integrity, the new container runtimes will still work seamlessly with existing MQ deployments on any other platform or environment. But the new container MQ gets the options of a self-contained container-native high availability option providing seamless uptime, continuing access to messages, all at a lower cost and with reduced complexity. And customers can build new applications to benefit from being able to deploy new Queue Manager instances in minutes rather than months.
Connecting different applications together can be hugely complex. But IBM App Connect as part of Cloud Pak for Integration has smart connectors for almost every application and comes with AI powered assistance to help you connect and map fields. And each integration flow you deploy can run in a separate container runtime, reducing inter-dependencies, and increasing scalability without needing to scale up the whole environment.
Your enterprise data can be widely shared through APIs using IBM API Connect with new APIs created simply without coding. APIs which can then be tested automatically through AI powered ‘Auto Test Assist’, and then socialized through a portal to provide access more widely.
And business events can be distributed, discovered and real-time responses triggered into action with Event Streams and Event Endpoint Management. Again deployed into containers, under a consistent deployment and update framework, without creating a complex framework of deployments. Keeping your business agile.
With fully containerized integration to meet all business needs your business is now modern, adaptable, and agile. You can take it anywhere you want to go. At scale and securely. Cloud Pak for Integration helps you move forward with every step. Get started now with a 60 day trial. And check out the easy deployment option on Azure Marketplace.
Tags: Agile Integration, API Connect, App Connect, Azure Marketplace, CI/CD, Cloud Pak for Integration, Event Endpoint Management, Event Streams, IBM, IBM MQ, Kubernetes, Modern Integration, Red Hat OpenShift
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