Integration challenges

Integrating new technologies with your existing systems or integrating disparate technologies to create new, marketable solutions are huge challenges. You’re not alone, it affects all organizations. Many enterprise IT leaders say integration challenges are a major obstacle to successfully adopting the competitive advantages that software as a service (SaaS) offers. The solution starts with understanding the reasons any change in how applications get integrated makes your IT team see red. We narrowed them down to five:

1. Complexity

Integration isn’t just about connecting one app to another, it’s about enabling new business processes or automating existing ones. There’s a lot to think about. After all, you’re not just connecting Dropbox to Salesforce and calling it a day. You need to understand exactly what happens to your data–and the processes that depend on it–when you change tothe status quo, whether that includes creating new integrations, editing or deleting them, or transferring ownership. It’s not easy. In fact, it can be quite frustrating.

2. Backlog

No one likes being overwhelmed and overworked. A growing backlog of integration requests from line-of-business power users is a sure-fire recipe for integration irritation. IT teams with more on their plate than they can handle–and with no sign of reinforcements–often throw up their hands in exasperation and search for workarounds to meet the demand. There’s a name for that: Shadow IT. Not good.

3. Redoing and repeating

There’s a saying: “There’s never enough time to do it right, but there’s always enough time to do it over.” Having to build the same one-off connections repeatedly or worse, crunching on an integration you were told was so urgent the fate of humankind hung in the balance, then having to redo it because it was jammed into your schedule edge-wise, is… is… there are no words. What suffers? Innovation, competitiveness and growth.

4. Failure

You’re seldom recognized for application integration success, but almost always recognized in the event something goes wrong and brings integration challenges. Ugh. Is there anything worse?

5. Time

Even if your team is able to secure the budget and expertise needed to get the job done, integrations can still take six months or more just to set up the environment needed to deploy them. Then you have to implement them, which, even if things go perfect, can still add months to fully complete the integration.

But you don’t have months! Okay…deep breaths.

What you can change now

Change is a given, especially in the application integration ecosystem landscape. That’s good. Because one of the things changing is the rapid adoption of hybrid integration platforms, which means you now have what it takes to modify or eliminate many of the negative aspects of application integration you’ve been dreading every day.

Hybrid integration platforms (HIPs) empower departments outside of your IT universe–ad hoc integrators, LOB power users and solution partners–to integrate for themselves. With a HIP, these new users can quickly discover, test and put into production solutions that integrate and extend systems and user experiences–all under the control of IT and in conformance with enterprise security policies.

Given that every enterprise is essentially in a hybrid state–with multiple back-end systems, data and file repositories, siloes and workloads in the cloud or on-premises–HIPs are critical to a company’s ongoing success, if not its survival.

IT should be an integration enabler, not an integration factory

HIPs bring into the equation, the power of self-service integration capabilities and best practices where IT maintains corporate oversight and serves as an enabler. In this regard, IT as we knew it is undergoing a fundamental shift in their function and delivery platforms.

Your IT team is no longer merely supporting off-the-shelf solutions, it’s embracing the idea of customizing application development for differentiation. In other words, the role of IT is necessarily transitioning from an integration factory to an integration enabler that can now focus on things like:

Running integration where closest to data C2B, G2C, C2C and G2G
Creating a unified catalog of integration service points
Enforcing policies around running and securing integrations
Simplifying service definitions and delivery

The era of integration platform as a service (iPaaS) has arrived

A pivotal component of hybrid integration platforms, iPaaS gives IT what it takes to be a true integration enabler. An iPaaS:

Simplifies complex integration through linking APIs
Unifies data models and prebuilt connectors to save you the time and expense of repetitiveness
Enables multistep business services to be run, managed and deployed in the cloud

Consider this Webinar

Your next step is not to determine if you need a hybrid integration platform, but when you need it and who can help you implement one. Axway’s AMPLIFY™ hybrid integration platform is an iPaaS solution that can put an end to integration rage way before you ever reach that stage.

Join us on September 19, 2019, for a webinar on how to make the case for an integration platform as a service. Register to attend.

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Five things you hate about application integration that you can change now