Integration: Eight Ways Your Life Will Change

Eight things you need to know about integration in 2020.

Ann Marie Bond Ann Marie Bond

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water, the integration landscape is about to change dramatically.

Rather than be afraid of diving into your next integration project, there are eight things you need to know to swim with the sharks in 2020.

  1. Get Under the Covers

The lines between application development and integration will blur as apps are compelled to have integration embedded under the covers, not as an afterthought.  Business services can involve complex interactions with cloud apps and data that require ordering, have dependencies or may even need to be reversible on demand.  You can handle these sophisticated jobs with advanced integration orchestration to manage app interaction. 

  1. The ESB is dead – long live the ESB!

As companies transition to more modern, distributed and hybrid architectures, ESB has become a term that’s synonymous with legacy.  But instead of focusing on eliminating legacy, the focus should be around the business problem they are trying to solve.  Thus, ESB is here to stay – as an essential element in the new world of APIs, microservices and cloud infrastructure, integrating legacy components and bringing together on-premises data and cloud SaaS models.

  1. B2B is Reborn in the Cloud

As an unseen but critical part of the business, on-premises B2B gets attention only when something fails. Now B2B integration is about to be given a new lease on life – in the cloud.  B2B in the cloud delivers a subscription-based cost model, along with easier access to SaaS apps, better user experience, fewer IT resources, and scalability.  The revived B2B model leverages APIs as a new channel for communicating with partners and suppliers. 

  1. Open Data Leads the Way

The proliferation of SaaS applications in the cloud has made it more difficult to create a coherent view of customer data that is already distributed across disparate systems.  The Open Data Initiative (ODI) is poised to tackle this with a common standard. You’ll soon be free to weave together behavioral, transactional and operational data about customers and leverage it for an amazing customer experience.

  1. Cloudy with a Chance of Clarity

Multi-cloud will mature for reasons of cost, efficiency and performance – and because organizations often want to deploy in closer proximity to their applications.  Therefore, any integration on Azure may need to interact with services/apps on AWS and GCP, but you will need a control plane that governs them and provides holistic visibility to IT teams, so they can focus on managing applications and integration instead of infrastructure. 

  1. A Hybrid World

Enterprises continue to rank hybrid as the ideal IT operating model, and this will only increase in 2020.  That’s because it gives organizations the flexibility they need to ensure critical data and systems are protected – while taking advantage of the many cloud options to keep costs under control.  Hybrid integration isn’t an alternative architecture; it’s the only architecture.

  1. Smarter APIs

API management is ripe for automation with new AI capabilities that protect and control APIs in an intelligent way.  This might include API policies that reconfigure dynamically based on traffic, security threats, and identified patterns.  The next level of security control is bots that sit in your network, constantly monitoring behavior and use machine learning to determine patterns that are threats.

  1. Integration of Things

The Internet of Things is growing astronomically and, as the number of devices increases, the amount of data increases exponentially.  Integration helps channel, refine and transform the data to leverage it for applications, automation, monitoring, and analytics.  That’s why we call IoT the “Integration of Things.” In 2020, IoT vendors must have integration in their toolkit to be viable.