What’s your integration and API management strategy? Traditional on-premises integration platforms provide a high degree of control while new integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) solutions offer ease of use. Which is better for you?

Enter a third option: the blend, a hybrid integration approach

What’s your integration and API strategy going forward?

You can:

• Build a future on cloud-based integration and leave your existing integration platform as is
• Stay with existing on-premises integration and ignore the future needs of cloud integration
• Or … plan for the inevitable and develop a hybrid integration strategy that combines both cloud-based and on-premises integrations without compromise

Let this short decision guide start you on the right path towards your future integration solution. You’ll also see why API management is a key consideration since APIs are the connectors in the new Internet of Things world.

If your application “Center of Gravity” (where most of your applications are deployed) is in the cloud, then your integration platform should be in the cloud. This usually happens when your business is new and you don’t have much of an on-premises application footprint. You can bypass on-premises-based integration and go with iPaaS. No installation, less configuration, no patching.

In short, an iPaaS means less hassle for you, faster time to integrate and probably lower total cost of ownership for integration.

The decision to go cloud-based gets more complicated, however, if you plan to keep many of your applications on-premises but otherwise have a “Cloud First” strategy in which every new application is SaaS … more on this later.

Let’s say you’ve been in business for a while and have most of your mission-critical Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and other applications on-premises. In this case, the “Center of Gravity” of your applications is on-premises and based on a few other considerations too, you might want to keep your integration on-premises.

One of these considerations is control. Some of the existing iPaaS products have provided ease of use at the expense of user control so understandably, you might be concerned about this … since more control (features) can often mean more complexity. There really isn’t a one-size-fits-all iPaaS.

If you have a mix of some applications on-premises and some in the cloud, your application “Center of Gravity” is, well, in the center. Welcome to hybrid integration.

When integrating your SaaS applications with other SaaS applications, why introduce latency by bringing the data on-premises and then back into either the same cloud or a different cloud? In this scenario, iPaaS generally makes sense for cloud-to-cloud application integration.

When you integrate with on-premises applications, you don’t have to deal with firewall issues if your integration platform is also on-premises. A common concern is, “Am I adding more complexity by having one integration tool in the cloud and a different toolset on-premises?” The answer is “yes” unless you use a hybrid integration platform, which provides both cloud integration and on-premises integration without having to integrate these two.

What about API initiatives?

Hybrid integration is the right answer for API initiatives as well. In fact, APIs and integration are two sides of the same coin. Including API management as part of your hybrid integration strategy offers several benefits:

• APIs typically require orchestrating pre-existing back-end services via “integration logic” and, therefore, combining API implementation with hybrid integration speeds up the initial API implementation and subsequent
• APIs exposed by different SaaS vendors are usually Hybrid integration techniques are required to make them work together.
• A single platform for hybrid integration and APIs reduces duplication of APIs, technologies, practices, skills and

APIs drive real business value but organizations need a wide range of capabilities to both expose APIs and consume APIs exposed by SaaS apps. Although the majority   of organizations have gained some experience with APIs, there are several challenges that persist:

1. Building awareness and adoption of APIs in a crowded digital ecosystem
2. Securing and protecting APIs from unauthorized access and malicious attacks
3. Managing the lifecycle of APIs from design to production to end of life

Enabling the creation and management of APIs in a single solution

If you have a mix of some applications on-premises and some in the cloud, your application “Center of Gravity” is, well, in the center. Welcome to hybrid integration.

When integrating your SaaS applications with other SaaS applications, why introduce latency by bringing the data on-premises and then back into either the same cloud or a different cloud? In this scenario, iPaaS generally makes sense for cloud-to-cloud application integration.

When you integrate with on-premises applications, you don’t have to deal with firewall issues if your integration platform is also on-premises. A common concern is, “Am I adding more complexity by having one integration tool in the cloud and a different toolset on-premises?” The answer is “yes” unless you use a hybrid integration platform, which provides both cloud integration and on-premises integration without having to integrate these two.

What about API initiatives?

Hybrid integration is the right answer for API initiatives as well. In fact, APIs and integration are two sides of the same coin. Including API management as part of your hybrid integration strategy offers several benefits:

• APIs typically require orchestrating pre-existing back-end services via “integration logic” and, therefore, combining API implementation with hybrid integration speeds up the initial API implementation and subsequent
• APIs exposed by different SaaS vendors are usually Hybrid integration techniques are required to make them work together.
• A single platform for hybrid integration and APIs reduces duplication of APIs, technologies, practices, skills and

APIs drive real business value but organizations need a wide range of capabilities to both expose APIs and consume APIs exposed by SaaS apps. Although the majority   of organizations have gained some experience with APIs, there are several challenges that persist:

1. Building awareness and adoption of APIs in a crowded digital ecosystem
2. Securing and protecting APIs from unauthorized access and malicious attacks
3. Managing the lifecycle of APIs from design to production to end of life
4. Enabling the creation and management of APIs in a single solution

How is hybrid integration platform unique in the market?

1. Our platform includes capabilities to integrate both on-premises and cloud
2. Our platform includes the easy-to-use webMethods Integration Cloud, ideal for non-technical applications and lines of business leaders because it has a simple and intuitive interface.
3. Our platform is designed for integration developers and provides an advanced integration platform with fine-grained control and the ability to support diverse use cases, including dev/test, “lift and shift” and more.
4. We addresses the concern of disparate integration tools in the cloud on-premises by supporting public, private and even managed clouds. You don’t need to learn a different toolset when all you need is to transition to the cloud.
5. You can do API management and integration on the same platform to reduce complexity and support a microservices-style architecture for faster speed and scalability.

Drive microservices and DevOps initiatives using hybrid integration platform

Today’s business demands that new applications and integrations be delivered quickly and be able to scale using microservices-style architectures. To deliver microservices- style architectures, you will need integrations to scale in the cloud using a container such as Docker®. As on-premises apps get replaced by cloud-based apps, it makes sense to deliver the integration between the SaaS apps in the cloud itself.

Using our hybrid integration platform, you can achieve a microservices-style architecture for hybrid integration:

• You can move existing integration services into a Docker container and run them in the cloud to achieve web By selecting a subset of the integration services, you can selectively pick the services which are required for your microservices architecture and scale them independently from the rest of the services.
• Integration developers who are familiar with current DEV tooling can continue to use it while seamlessly converting services designed to integrate on-premises apps into services that integrate cloud apps with just a few When these services are moved to cloud, they can independently scale using the hybrid integration container.

Moreover, if you have decided to use DevOps for continuous delivery, then continuous integration is required to make that successful. Hybrid integration platform enables DevOps by:

• Providing user-appropriate tools for faster development. IT developers can use Eclipse™-based tools while ad-hoc developers and citizen integrators can use simpler web-based Developers can even develop while they are not connected to any network and use their own laptop for developing or updating services. This speeds up the ultimate delivery of integration logic.
• Automating testing for performance regressions to make sure changes in one service don’t break anything anywhere This helps in two areas. First, it reduces the time spent in testing and enables faster development and deployment. Second, it improves the code quality, so developers can now deliver better quality and faster too.

Take the next step

Want to know more about hybrid integration platform? Contact us