In this age of Digital Transformation, when we talk about Mobile, Social, Cloud, Internet of Things, Big Data, Machine Learning, and so on, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) sounds a little quaint, but neglecting it can be more dangerous to your business than ever.
Today, SaaS means that any business person with a credit card can add a new application to the enterprise within minutes. Commercial software can also be purchased and deployed in the cloud much faster than before. Even custom software development teams are using IaaS and PaaS to deliver applications in the time it used to take to do capacity planning.
The good news is that these new cloud-native applications usually come with modern APIs that make integrating them easier. (We no longer live in the barbaric times when interfacing with an application required reverse engineering its database.) But not integrating new applications or using a wrong integration architecture has even bigger consequences than it did before. When there were only a few applications used in the enterprise, and the amount of data was small, it was possible to get away with things like double entry for a while. Now there are more applications, a lot more data, and it all moves much faster, so adding an application without considering new events it may generate or existing events in the enterprise that should impact it in some way will cause a disaster in no time at all.
You can buy integration platform software that you can run in your data center or in the cloud, or you can use an integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS), but beware any sales people who tell you that their platform enables integration without any software development. EAI is still software development, and it is one of the main reasons why almost all businesses today develop software to some extent. You can buy or rent software that lets you run parts of your business, but how these applications are integrated determines to a large extent how your business is conducted. Integration is a major part of Business Process Management (BPM) which is what differentiates your business from your competitors. And that which differentiates your business is not something you can buy off-the-shelf.
So you may be in finance, healthcare, energy, transportation, entertainment or any other industry, but to go from an idea/opportunity to a product/service, you have to develop software. You can buy some of it, you can buy an integration platform, and you can buy consulting and software development services, but you still have to implement your own EAI because it is one of your business differentiators.
The best way to do it is to eliminate as much undifferentiated heavy lifting as possible. Focus on your business and what differentiates you in the marketplace, and assuming that is not IT or software development, buy the IT, the cloud architecture, the integration architecture and the software development services.
