How to Choose the Integration Tool That Can Best Meet Your Organization’s Needs
Blog: The Tibco Blog
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The pace of change in digital business has accelerated as many organizations struggle to keep up with changing customer expectations, new market challenges, and competition. Businesses need to be able to adapt more quickly than ever before to new challenges, but this ability requires a highly flexible and scalable digital ecosystem that easily connects apps, devices, and data. Unfortunately, highly complex and dispersed IT environments hold many organizations back from achieving their digital business initiatives.
TIBCO has worked with a variety of businesses that have cited three common barriers to creating connected digital landscapes:
- Dated, inflexible application architectures that are fragile, as well as costly and time consuming to adapt
- Increasingly complex information landscapes characterized by many diverse assets hosted in multiple environments
- A massive backlog of integration requests across the enterprise—and a shortage of integration specialists to meet the demand.
These challenges in and of themselves are daunting. Additionally, many businesses have trouble navigating the ever-expanding list of integration tools available to them. This means many organizations have difficulty identifying the best-fit integration tool for their needs.
While most organizations would prefer to have a one-size-fits-all integration tool for all their needs, according to Gartner®, “Through 2024, 75 percent of midsize to large enterprises will leverage at least two different integration tool categories in order to strategically address most of their pervasive integration needs.” In this report, Gartner details how you can diagnose your integration challenges and find the right solution for your business.
Basic Integration Patterns: The Big Three Breakdown
According to the Gartner report, “even the most complex integration tasks can always be reduced to a combination of three basic integration patterns:
- Data consistency: You want to make sure that data about certain business entities (e.g., customers, products, suppliers, employees, patients, citizens and assets) scattered across multiple databases and applications is in sync (e.g., the address of customer XYZ is the same across your customer relationship management [CRM], enterprise resource planning [ERP], and billing applications).
- Multistep process: You want independent applications to collaborate in order to streamline a certain business process by automatically synchronizing the activity and exchanging data. For example, your supply chain management (SCM) application notifies your warehouse management system (WMS) about the arrival of a certain quantity of product ABC. In turn, the WMS updates your ERP through the exchange of financial data about the just-arrived products.
- Composite Services: You want to develop a new application that must access data in some preexistent applications. For example, you want to develop a mobile app for your salespeople that displays and updates customer data in your ERP and CRM systems. Modern applications usually expose application programming interfaces [APIs] to support this use case, but legacy applications typically do not, which makes addressing this use case more difficult than it may seem at first.”
The report lists “ten categories of widely used tools, some of which might not be considered integration technology, per se, that can each be used, to various degrees, to address these three patterns of integration.”
Businesses need to be able to adapt more quickly than ever before to new challenges, but this ability requires a highly flexible and scalable digital ecosystem that easily connects apps, devices, and data.
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The Right Tool for the Right Job
The volume and potential overlap of these tools can make it difficult to select the one that will best meet your organization’s needs. Download the full Gartner report with TIBCO’s compliments to learn more about the integration tools that are available to you and how to identify the best tool to address your specific integration challenges.
Gartner is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
Choose the Best Integration Tool for Your Needs Based on the Three Basic Patterns of Integration, Benoit Lheureux, Keith Guttridge 11 February 2021
The post How to Choose the Integration Tool That Can Best Meet Your Organization’s Needs first appeared on The TIBCO Blog.
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