Did you know?
The global integration platform as a service market was valued at $3.4 billion in 2021, and is projected to reach $37.9 billion by 2031, growing at a CAGR of 27.5% from 2022 to 2031
(source Allied Market Research)
Quick Stats About Business Value generated by Integration
Here are a few interesting data points to give you context:
- According to a study by Forrester Consulting, businesses that implemented integration solutions experienced a 50% reduction in timbe spent on manual data entry and a 25% improvement in productivity.
- A survey by MuleSoft found that 84% of businesses reported increased revenue after implementing integration solutions.
- According to a survey by Accenture, companies that implemented integration solutions reported an average cost savings of 11% in the first year.One study by Harvard Business Review found that businesses that improved their data accuracy experienced a 10% increase in revenue.
Needless to say, business value generated by integration can be significantly high for modern enterprises.
So… what can we learn from the modern enterprises about Digital Integration?
Modern enterprises’ 5-Step Framework For Integration Platform Strategy!
From my work in this area, all their success can be boiled down to a very simple process:
Step 1: Scale integration of applications
Step 2: Broaden the scope of data integration
Step 3: Make real-time processing of information
Step 4: Enable legacy modernization
Step 5: Align to cloud migration
Pair this framework with your solution architecture thinking and you get a potent combination for outcome & recognition.
Let’s dig in:
Step 1: Scale Integration of Applications
For modern enterprises, everything begins with application integration.
The reason is because modern enterprises treats applications as apps (services), there are hundreds of them and integration among them is the life-blood of the enterprise.
To do this, modern enterprises does the following:
- Implement a queue-based or publish-subscribe model, where each app (microservice) pushes events to a queue/topic and other app can listen/subscribe to the queue/topic.
- Even for the legacy systems, they avoid point-to-point integration and associated tight coupling that is difficult to scale
- Make it easier to build event-driven applications to distribute events – even in real-time – and include horizontal scaling to handle increasing volumes of integration events
Simple, but highly effective.
Step 2: Broaden the Scope of Data Integration
The next thing modern enterprises focus on is Data Integration.
They do this by making use of existing data integration tools (ETL tools like informatica), and sometimes even leverage application integration platforms (e.g. – Kafka, RabbitMQ) for data integration.
They often focus on data streaming capability – ingest, transform, process data in real time rather than traditional time-bound batch processing.
This is what separates them from the competition, and makes them stand out so much compared to the average enterprises.
They also focus on handling on a variety of data formats in integration – JSON, XMLS, Avro, protobuf, Apache Thrift
I consider these two as the “winning quality” of modern enterprises who look beyond existing traditional way of integrating data.
Step 4: Enable Legacy Modernization
Too often, modern enterprises do have footprints from legacy.
Legacy systems often are monolithic and difficult to scale and maintain. And often, those systems rely on batch processing and polling, which can be slow and inefficient.
Just like the enterprises adopt a microservice architecture to improve the scalability, resilience, and maintainability of their systems, a messaging layer is needed to enable the communication among those.
An integration platform helps to improve the speed and efficiency of the legacy systems in the course of modernization.
Step 5: Align with Cloud Migration
A good strategy is to migrate customer facing channels to cloud to improve agility and reduce cost of operation.
A bad strategy is to have the entire enterprise running on-prem (data center) infrastructure that is difficult to change and expensive to manage.
An excellent strategy is agile, customer facing channels, external data integration capability to cloud and establish an efficient, scalable, secured bridge between cloud & data center.
This strategy involves a key role for Integration platform –
- Integration platforms (like Kafka) integrate with a wide range of cloud-based services e.g. – AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions
- Integration platform enables implementation of event sourcing & CQRS to capture every application change as a stream of events and sync the cloud hosted channels for consistent experience of the customers
- Integration platform is used in replication of data between data centers, between cloud & data centers for high availability and disaster recovery capabilities.
That’s it – those are the 5 Steps of Integration Strategy for modern enterprises.
My guess is that the Integration Platform scope within the enterprise is going to bigger & bigger.
Strategic clarity of Digital Architects about the means & outcomes of Digital Integration will be a key differentiation.
What do you think? Do you agree? Disagree?
Let me know in your response. Till next week!