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Contributed on August 9, 2017

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On the Radar: Jitterbit

Jitterbit is a specialist software vendor focused on integration across cloud platforms and customers’ data centres. Its core product, the Harmony Platform, is a cloud-based integration platform that offers transactional application and data integration, API creation and API management capabilities. Integrations can be deployed in the cloud, or on premise.

Who?

Jitterbit (www.jitterbit.com) is a specialist software vendor focused on integration across cloud platforms and customers’ data centres. Jitterbit was founded in 2003, and is venture funded. Jitterbit is based in Alameda CA, and also has offices in the UK (London), The Netherlands (Amsterdam) and Australia.

What does it do?

Jitterbit’s core product, the Harmony Platform, is a cloud-based integration platform that offers transactional application and data integration, API creation and API management capabilities. Integrations can be deployed in the cloud, or on premise.

The Harmony Platform has five core elements:

• Jitterbit Studio. This Java-based design tool, available for Windows and Mac, is aimed at technical integration designers. Its core functionality is based around two graphical tools: one for specifying data mapping and transformation operations, and the other for designing integration workflows that orchestrate mapping and transformation operations together with other automated validation and decision steps. An ‘AutoMapper’ function offers suggested data mappings between source and target types based on similarities between source and target field names; in addition, there’s a plugin architecture – with a set of prebuilt plugins – that enables you to implement additional technical connectivity functionality without scripting (for example, encrypting/decrypting data, compressing/uncompressing files and so on). If you do need to script some custom behaviour, you can use the proprietary Jitterbit Script Language – and the Formula Builder editing tool provided to help you create scripts – to do that. You can use Jitterbit Studio to create and validate complete integration specifications ready for deployment; but you can also create (and indeed, consume) integration specification templates called ‘Jitterpaks’.
• The Web Management Console. Developers and administrators use the functionality here to set up one or more deployment environments (so you can, for example, have separate development, test, a production environments in place); configure groups of Smart Agents (see below) to execute your integration specifications within those environments; deploy specifications; and create, secure, version and monitor HTTP and OData APIs for your integrations. This is also home to the API Creation and Management functionality of Harmony. Here, users can click to configure API access rules, set throttling and rate limits, and monitor and analyze the usage and health of their APIs.
• The API Gateway. The Harmony API Gateway provides security and management capabilities for all APIs. APIs are published to the Cloud API Gateway and can be deployed to run 100% in the Harmony Cloud, a Private Cloud, or behind your firewall. The Harmony API Gateway routes all API request and responses and guaranteed messaging ensures that all API calls and their payloads make it to their destination.
• Citizen Integrator. Part of the Web Management Console, this cloud-based tool is aimed at a broader base of individuals and provides users with a high-level, configuration-based design experience based around the selection and completion of specialised integration templates called ‘Recipes’. Jitterbit and its partners are responsible for creating and managing an ever-growing set of prebuilt Recipes that are pre-configured to make the process of integrating with popular cloud-based application services simple; importantly, the packaging tools and specifications are open – which means that in addition, your own technical designers and developers can augment Jitterpak templates they’ve created (see above) with additional configuration metadata to create Recipes for internal enterprise use.
• Smart Agents. Smart Agents provide the runtime services that execute the integration specifications created within Jitterbit Studio and Citizen Integrator. Cloud Agents are hosted and managed as part of the Harmony Platform cloud service; Local Agents can be deployed on-premise to Linux or Windows Server hosts. Integration operations deployed to Smart Agents can be triggered by external events; or alternatively you can specify that they should run in ‘batch mode’ according to a schedule you define.

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