What should you take into account when selecting an integration platform? Technology adviser Matthias Meijer presented 4 aspects of the latest Tibco product you might want to consider.
“Easy Process, Service and API Implementation”
To solve integration problems you need:
- A “fast and agile” workspace development environment, facilitating (usually by drag and drop) the design phase of your process workflow.
- Available out-of-the-box and easy configurable connectors to specific applications like SAP or Salesforce.
- Other artifact types like XML parsers, SQL statement executors, SOAP/REST request/response clients and mappers, which let you use and transform data from any point in your workflow.
“Support for Complete Development Lifecycle”
To enable a complete development lifecycle:
- Your platform should use one single IDE for all stages of the development lifecycle (development, debugging, testing and deployment).
- In Matthias Meijer’s words, “Deployment, execution and debugging should be done locally or on a remote server or even in the cloud.”
- Automated testing should be easily put in place by the integration platform.
- Application properties should be easily configured (in design time and run time) across all environments of the development lifecycle.
“Modular Lightweight Platform.”
An integration modular platform should:
- use a scalable runtime with low hardware footprint.
- support multiple architecture styles like ESB, SOA and Microservices.
- enable quick releases, bug fixes and change requests of services working in a Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery mode.
“Unified View for Central Management and Monitoring”
With a distributed platform, you might be working with a huge number of machines, applications and services running in the integration environment. To be able to Administrate, Monitor, Analyse, Diagnose and Govern all of this, you need a unified web interface.
The future
Nowadays having an Integration platform is critical for big organizations because of the amount of applications/systems they need to integrate. But in the coming years such platforms will be also a must have for medium sized organizations, mostly because data will be a real asset, and an integration platform, the critical enabler of the data value chain.
Like VP Strategy Edd Dumbill says, we will see all organizations moving their IT mindset “from an application-centric view of the world, focused on functional units that fulfill well-defined business purposes” to a data-centric view of the world where “The ability to use data as the raw material of business and to view it as an asset from which value can be created”, will be required.
Sources
http://www.ibmbigdatahub.com/blog/understanding-data-value-chain by Edd Dumbill
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-tibco-activematrix-businessworks-6-leading-service-meijer by Matthias Meijer
