The integration platform as a service (iPaaS) market is not just growing, it is accelerating. iPaaS is a cloud service that provides a platform to support applications that involve a combination of data sources, cloud-based applications and others.
Digital transformation requires more compelling customer touch points, which means businesses need to integrate more systems, people, and things than ever before. With requests for integration between applications (both in the cloud and on-premises) on the rise, the job of creating and managing those connections can become overwhelmingly complex.
iPaaS offers a solution to this problem, providing simplified, centralized integration capabilities that increase digital transformation, speed and agility while adding to the value of IT investments. Let’s see how iPaaS is changing the game of integration at enterprises.
Integration as a Platform: A New Approach to Cloud Integration
Application integration has often been an exercise in frustration – long delays, high costs and over promises by vendors. Integration, though, is coming to a new place. Cloud technologies and open APIs are helping enterprises merge on-premise and off-premise systems without considerable coding and re-architecting. Instead of requiring specialists in SOA, enterprise service bus (ESB), extract transform and load (ETL) and data warehousing – organizations are hoping the concept of Integration Platform as a Service can be used to integrate systems in half the time using self-service techniques by technically-savvy generalists and increased involvement from lines of business.
Behind the move to more flexible, cloud integration platforms are two core trends: “cloudification,” the race to transform organizations to cloud-based architectures; and the need for agility, as business users expectations’ for rapid delivery of new web, social and mobile services continue to grow.
Changing the rules of engagement within organizations:
In most organizations today, IT is struggling to keep pace. All this diversity and complexity in integration methods and deployments results in increasing demands of IT every day. 550 senior IT decision makers were surveyed by an independent research organization Vanson Bourne on behalf of Axway and the survey results show that other departments are relying on IT to perform their integration tasks for them; every day (21%) or quite often (54%).
iPaaS removes the barriers developers and IT teams typically face each time a new application is added into business and enables to build codeless integrations and automate processes twice as fast as before by simply dragging and dropping. iPaaS helps shifting the focus from IT teams as an integration factory to an integration enabler.
The benefits of Low-Code Development
Low-code refers to drag-and-drop, point-and-click capabilities by which developers can visually map out connectivity and utilize prebuilt connectors. It provides a huge productivity gain and accelerates an organization’s digital transformation.
However, low-code doesn’t mean low-capability. Hands-on coding lets developers tackle integration jobs of any complexity across both cloud and on-premise applications. A low-code platform supports mainstream API- and event-driven architectures, and allows for concurrency, checkpoint/restart, and exception management. It’s built from the cloud up for secure high-throughput messaging and high availability in demanding enterprise environments.
In addition, the high visibility of integration flows using low-code development tooling eliminates the time-consuming, paper-based design phase of an integration project. Now integration requirements and implementation happen with far less labor. A simple whiteboard session is all that iPaaS developers need to do to quickly build out an integration that can be easily tested and refined in rapid iterations.
API Management use case
Enterprises have traditionally relied on different tools for iPaaS and API management. However, users are beginning to wonder whether this is necessary. Most API management solutions are designed to publish and manage APIs and not necessarily link things together. The same can be said for iPaaS tools, but in the inverse; they are great for connecting data, applications and partners in B2B situations, and not very good for managing these processes in the long-term.
Providers are recognizing this emerging use case by including services that have to do with transformation, provisioning and monitoring in relation to API management. This creates an effective link between API management and iPaaS.
On May 23, Axway is hosting a webinar to share why API Management and iPaaS solutions work better together. Learn how Axway’s hybrid integration platform AMPLIFY provides both API Management and Application Integration capabilities through a single platform to accelerate consumption and delivery of new business services for any organization. The AMPLIFY Application Integration capability is a new iPaaS solution offering that removes the barriers developers and IT teams typically face each time a new application is added into a business by enabling them to orchestrate, build, synchronize, replicate, transform and organize data residing anywhere – in the cloud or on-premises.
Register for the free webinar on iPaaS and API Management.