Reap the Benefits of Agile Integration in your Organization

Staying competitive in today’s business environment means that enterprises need the ability to quickly build and scale business applications. Development and deployment delays put them at risk of falling behind their marketplace competitors. One way to combat the inefficiencies in traditional enterprise application builds is by transforming the IT culture through agile integration.

Why Your Organization Can’t Afford to Wait on an Agile Integration Transformation

Many organizations approach application integration in a silo-like approach. They funnel data from one application to another, usually through an enterprise service bus (ESB). Initially, the approach worked in exposing API endpoints to various applications so they could share data sources.

The problems hit home when organizations come up with expansion plans reliant on having a fast, flexible architecture.

• An ESB cluster with multiple integrations on one production server, complicating efforts to scale a single application.
• Huge runtime sizes making ESB hubs hard to start and stop.
• Developers spending a lot of time and effort performing live patches as needed.
• Difficulty in tracking server configurations.
• Problems replicating the production environment at a lower level to support testing and issue diagnosis.
• Many ESBs turn into bottlenecks that slow down attempts to build new processes or expand existing ones.

The unwieldiness of the model means changing one application could lead to impacts on tens or even hundreds of other business services.

Left at a Standstill

Organizations miss out on opportunities to improve their time-to-market on new products.  That leaves them in a place where they’re watching competitors pass them by in the marketplace. It’s because the traditional application integration approach makes it difficult to grow and scale the company IT infrastructure in a way that supports a company’s expansion plans.

Unwieldy Legacy Infrastructure

One of the biggest difficulties for companies on their digital transformation journey is dealing with old legacy systems. Organizations must assess the capabilities of each part of the infrastructure, which is harder to do when you have components managed by different areas.

It’s difficult to break through the silo thought process and get everyone on the same page. Bringing in newer tools becomes more difficult when you don’t have a consistent picture about what different components lack that would enable integration with newer SaaS tools and other technology.

Erratic API Tracking

Many companies lack tools needed for monitoring, tracking, and managing API consumption. APIs with untracked issues fail at a critical moment, leaving employees without the business tools needed to support organizational efforts. It’s vital that businesses find ways of dealing with blind spots in API performance.

Inconsistent Customer Experience

The traditional application integration approach typically leads to multiple development teams without coordinating with other areas managing similar tools using the same data sources. That could lead to disparities in the behavior available from a web page and mobile app from the same organization.

Poor SaaS Tool Integration

Integrating SaaS technology with legacy systems can be tricky. A lot of development teams resort to ad hoc coding to get around the problem. That means changing the code base for every change request, affecting the ability of a organization to scale up their company operations more quickly.

What is Agile Integration?

Agile integration transforms how businesses approach application development. It involves restructuring components and other services into units of work, called microservices, focused on performing a specific function. For example, a loan company could have one microservice dedicated to processing incoming loan applications, and another for accepting payments.

The Pillars of Agile Integration

Distributed Integration — Instead of putting responsibility on centralized ESB, an organization creates multiple integrations, each built to support a specific business function.

API — APIs allow companies to create interfaces that connect users to important business assets. They create a layer across all organization systems, making them accessible by everyone in the organization.

Containers — These self-contained application bundles hold the components needed to rapidly deploy and modify builds. They enable packaging of software for centralized management and scaling.

How Agile Integration Addresses Traditional Enterprise Application Build Issues

Agile integration supports a company’s digital transformation journey in three ways:

• Implicit Coordination — Agile integration allows organizations to create consistent customer experiences by building a network of applications using data resources available to the entire organization.
• Clearer Line of Sight Into APIs — Organizations can use agile integration to address disparities in APIs and their use by different systems.
• Better Scalability — A microservices infrastructure makes it easier for organizations to expand their capabilities and enable legacy systems to coordinate with newer SaaS tools. Employees have what they need to work faster and improve time-to-market.

Move Forward With Agile Integration

Make the choice to transform your company into a flexible, future-facing enterprise. Sumerge specializes in helping small and large organizations realize the benefits of agile integration.

Feel free to contact us today and set up a consultation