The Right Integration Solution is a Strategic Weapon for Innovation
Blog: The Tibco Blog
At the recent Gartner Application Architecture, Development and Integration (AADI) Summit in Sydney, analysts Eric Thoo and Massimo Pezzini presented the Hybrid Integration Platform—a set of capabilities that address the integration needs of businesses as they grow their operations across hybrid environments (on-premises, public clouds, and devices at the edge of networks) and expand the integration use cases to fit their business needs.
During their sessions, they shared that one of the key features of a Hybrid Integration Platform is that it supports a variety of constituents, including traditional integration specialists, but also non-traditional ‘citizen’ or ‘ad-hoc’ integrators. These integrators are able to participate in the integration process, but possess a different set of skills than those of traditional integrators.
You might ask how your business could benefit by bringing non-traditional integrators into your integration process. For starters, as your digital capabilities expand, the number of applications and data endpoints that need to be integrated, especially SaaS applications, expands in kind. This, however, puts a lot of additional burden on your IT staff to create and maintain these integrations. But by empowering non-traditional integrators (eg application owners) to develop their own integrations, integrations are accelerated everywhere and your business runs faster. Call it self-service integration.
But you can realize vastly more benefits by embracing non-traditional integrators. Consider that the people on the front lines of your business—those who work directly with your customers, suppliers, partners and more—know the ins and outs of the environment in which your business operates. They not only see how integrations can help your business operate faster and more efficiently, but they also see opportunities to work more intelligently through insights generated by connecting data together, to streamline and adapt your processes to new market conditions, and how to do business differently and more profitably through innovation. All of these scenarios are enabled by integrations. It makes sense then to arm the people who are in a position to make a difference to your business with integration tools that help them to make that difference.
When you look at it this way, integration then isn’t just a necessary byproduct of a growing IT ecosystem. As Massimo made clear at AADI, “Integration can instead be viewed as a secret business weapon, not just a necessary evil.” It can transform your business and create new competitive advantages. The technology of a hybrid integration platform certainly helps achieve this, but it’s the people that utilize that technology to the benefit of your business. By bringing traditional and nontraditional integrators together, you in effect ‘crowdsource’ the very best integrations.
TIBCO Software provides capabilities defined by the hybrid integration platform. Our TIBCO Cloud Integration platform is designed with a variety of user experiences, each tailored to a different integration skill set and use case. Northwoods Consulting, On24, and Regent University accelerated their integrations through the ease-of-use provided by TIBCO Cloud Integration. You can try it for a limited time at no charge by registering for a trial edition.
Changing your organizational view of integrations and empowering non-integrators to participate in your integration process opens the door to a wide variety of new benefits for your business, as Massimo stated during his “The Hybrid Integration Platform: Can You Be in Business Without One” session, including “increased efficiencies, situational awareness through insight development, heightened business agility, and accelerated innovation.” With hybrid integration platform capabilities provided by TIBCO Software, you can give your business a strategic weapon for innovation.
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