With the growing advent of cloud services, new challenges and opportunities emerge when it comes to addressing the perennial application and data integration issue. A special form of integration platform, integration platform as a service (iPaaS), has emerged over the past few years to address this specific challenge. Gartner predicts that by 2016, at least 35 percent of all large and midsize organizations worldwide will be using one or more iPaaS offerings in some form.
That’s the word from analyst Massimo Pezzini, vice president & Gartner Fellow, who noted that inconsistency, semantic conflicts, redundancy and duplication of data are inevitable, whether applications are in the cloud or on premises. iPaaS meanwhile is a suite of cloud services enabling the development, execution and governance of integration flows connecting any combination of on-premises and cloud-based processes, services, applications and data within individual, or across multiple, organizations.
“Therefore, the problem of integrating cloud-based systems with each other and with established on premises environment should be addressed with the same rigor and discipline that organizations have adopted to support on-premises data and application integration or e-commerce B2B integration,” he said.
Organizations are increasingly turning to iPaaS offerings because of their close affinity with SaaS and the anticipated greater ease of use, lower costs and faster time-to-integration than traditional integration platforms.
For most large organizations, iPaaS will complement, not replace, the traditional on-premises integration middleware (such as, enterprise service buses, B2B gateway software, and managed file transfer). Therefore, dealing with the coexistence and federation of iPaaS and on-premises integration platforms will be the norm for most IT leaders.
“In addition to considering [cloud services integration (CSI)]-oriented technology platforms, CSI will also require organizations to plan for an incremental development of their integration team’s organizational structure, methodologies and governance processes,” the analyst noted. “In fact, CSI projects often require a more agile approach and faster time to value than traditional application or data integration initiatives.”
If CSI is not a core competency IT leaders are interested in developing, or cannot afford to develop, Gartner recommends they adopt integration outsourcing policies, such as integration brokerage.
