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Tag: iPaaS

Digibee Adds AI Tool to Accelerate Migration to Integration Platform

Digibee is leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to make it simpler to migrate to its integrated platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) environment by converting code into a JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format.

A translator tool created by Digibee invokes large language models (LLM) to convert that code into a JSON file that can then run on the Digibee Integration Platform.

Initially, that capability is being made available to facilitate migrations from the Mulesoft integration platform made available by Salesforce, with support for other legacy integration platforms planned for 2024.

Digibee CTO Peter Kreslins Junior said this approach reduced the level of time and effort required to switch platforms by using generative AI to map and refactor legacy integration code. That refactoring process doesn’t completely automate the reverse engineering of workflows, but it does substantially reduce the total cost of switching platforms by, for example, automating data migration and simplifying the transfer of configurations, he noted.

Generative AI also eliminates the need to rely on documentation or maps that either may be limited or non-existent, added Kreslins. Instead, all the integration patterns used can now be automatically discovered by an LLM, he added.

IT teams will still need to vet and test the code created by the translator tool, but overall, the speed at which any migration effort is made should be accelerated, thanks to the rise of generative AI, in 2024. Many organizations are locked into various platforms today simply because the effort required to rework the code that has been created to extend them has required either too much effort on their part or the contracting of expensive consultants. A migration project that might have taken a year or more can now be accomplished in a few days, said Kreslins. The overall goal is to reduce the current level of pain IT teams experience when migrating between platforms, he added.

It’s not clear if the rise of generative AI platforms that make converting code into other formats and languages simpler will drive a wave of migrations, but there are many organizations relying on legacy platforms that are not nearly as easy to use as more modern alternatives. As the time and effort required to make those transitions is reduced, more IT teams will be, at the very least, more open to considering their platform options. The providers of those legacy platforms will naturally have to invest in new capabilities much faster to discourage customers from migrating to another platform.

In the meantime, the amount of code that will need to be integrated is about to exponentially increase as developers rely more on LLMs to generate code. The downstream implications of that increased pace of application development for DevOps teams are profound. It’s not clear to what degree those teams can increase the level of scale at which they today manage application deployments.

The one thing that is clear is there is no going back because, so far as application development and deployment are concerned, the proverbial AI genie is out of the bottle.

December 20, 2023
Google Announces Availability of iPaaS Service

Google today made available an integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) capable of invoking a range of methods to integrate applications.

Initially developed for the Apigee application programming interface (API) management platform Google acquired in 2016, the Application Integration service can now, for example, also consume a publish and subscribe event or an event driven through a Salesforce platform.

Amit Zavery, vice president and general manager for Google Platform, said the Application Integration service provides IT organizations with all the benefits of an iPaaS without requiring them to stand up and manage an integration platform themselves.

The Google Application Integration service also provides access to a Visual Integration Designer tool that can be used to build workflows using a low-code tool. In total, there are now more than 75 connectors that can be used to integrate multiple Google Cloud services and third-party platforms that can run in either a cloud or on-premises IT environment, said Zavery.

In general, visual tools are transforming how integrations are created and expanded within organizations, noted Zavery. Rather than using lower-level procedural code, a visual tool enables developers to employ low-code to create integrations. That makes it simpler to collaborate with business users that can now more easily participate in developing workflows.

In fact, in some cases, business users, otherwise known as citizen developers, have enough technical acumen to create their own workflows using low-code tools.

There are, naturally, going to be plenty of complex integration challenges that will require procedural code, but the bulk of the integrations required today are not especially complex.

Regardless of who creates the integration, the number of them being employed across an enterprise organization continues to increase as more digital business transformation initiatives are launched. Developers are not going to be able to keep pace with the demand for those integrations if they rely solely on procedural code. The only way to effectively reduce the backlog for integrations is to rely more on visual tools to construct them. In most cases, the integration being created is relatively trivial. The only reason it wasn’t created sooner is there are not enough developers available to complete that task using procedural code.

There are, of course, no shortage of iPaaS options available. As more workloads are deployed in the cloud, Google is betting the center of gravity for integration will shift toward the places where modern microservices-based workloads are deployed to reduce overall latency.

It’s not clear whether organizations still view integration as an afterthought versus employing an integration platform around which all applications revolve. That latter approach tends to reduce the total cost of integration when compared to using multiple point products that are not managed via single framework, noted Zavery.

Ultimately, IT teams that adopt an iPaaS are able to focus more on higher-value IT tasks. The issue is determining which integration projects really require professional developers with lots of integration expertise and which, via a low-code tool, can be handled by almost any developer.

July 20, 2023
Talend Aligns With Microsoft on DevOps

Talend has made its integration platform natively available on the Microsoft Azure cloud to provide DevOps teams employing Azure DevOps with an easier approach to creating pipelines and integrating data.

Vincent Lam, head of cloud product marketing for Talend, said the company is now making available 900 connectors and components to DevOps teams that use the continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) platform Microsoft offers as a service.

By providing deep hooks into the Azure platform, Lam says Talend is looking to make it easier for teams to build applications by relying on an integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) environment to access data stored in Microsoft cloud services such as Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Azure Databricks, Azure Data Lake Store and Azure HDInsight.

From a DevOps perspective, the Azure DevOps Orchestration engine has now been integrated with Talend’s zero-install continuous integration capability, which it created as part of an effort to integrate its integration service with CI/CD platforms such as Jenkins. That effort made it possible to leverage CI orchestration tools to automatically build unit tests and package Talend jobs in an artifact repository. That capability has now been extended to Azure DevOps.

Not every organization that uses Azure will employ Azure DevOps because they may have already standardized on another CI/CD platform, which they prefer to deploy and manage. However, because Azure lowers the barrier to entry for employing DevOps to build applications, Talend is now seeing a lot of demand for an iPaaS environment on Azure, Lam said.

Regardless of platform, as organizations start to build cloud-native applications based on microservices, many of them underestimate the integration challenges they will face. Each microservice has its own application programming interface that needs to be built and supported, which in turn is driving more convergence of DevOps platforms and iPaaS environments to help manage the APIs on which those microservices depend. As a result, IT organizations today need to apply more forethought to their overall API strategy, said Lam.

Talend is not the only provider of an integration platform to appreciate the role that DevOps processes and the rise of microservices are having on driving increased consumption of integration services. But it’s not clear whether access to integration services will become more democratized across IT organizations. Rather than continuing to rely on “centers of excellence” to centrally manage integration projects, many IT organizations have come to realize DevOps teams need to be able to access integration capabilities on demand. To facilitate that process, vendors such as Talend are making a concerted effort to couple integration platforms tightly with various DevOps platforms.

It remains to be seen to what degree integration platforms will remain standalone platforms versus becoming a capability to be invoked within the context of a CI/CD pipeline. Given the volume of monolithic applications that still depend on centrally managed integration platforms, it may be a while before the integration platform becomes subsumed in DevOps platforms. In the meantime, however, the line between DevOps and integration platforms will surely get more blurry.

— Mike Vizard

October 23, 2019
Dell Boomi Dives Into DevOps

Boomi, a Dell Technologies business, today announced it has extended its integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) platform to include application programming interface (API) lifecycle management capabilities.

Announced at the Boomi World 2019 conference, the API lifecycle management tools are an extension of a larger initiative to bring apply best DevOps practices to the building of APIs deployed using the Atom runtime that Boomi relies on to integrate applications and processes.

The three additions being made to the Boomi platform include an API Proxy, a centralized mechanism managing Boomi and third-party APIs; API Gateway, a mechanism for applying governance to APIs; and a self-service API Developer Portal.

In addition, Boomi announced integrations with Pravega, an open source data streaming software project led by Dell EMC, and the publish and subscribe software made available by Solace. Those partnerships extend an Event Driven Architecture that Boomi has defined around its iPaaS environment that includes existing support for Amazon SQS, Microsoft’s Azure Service Bus services and Pivotal RabbitMQ software.

Steve Wood, chief product officer for Boomi, said by partnering with CloudBees to integrate the open source Jenkins continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) platform and joining the Continuous Delivery Foundation, Boomi is making a concerted effort to meld DevOps and API management to simplify deployment of the Atom runtimes on which the Boomi iPaaS platform depends to integrate applications and services.

In general, Boomi sees a need to embrace DevOps to help customers drive digital business initiatives. To become more agile, Wood said organizations need to be able to deploy Atom runtimes faster.

At the conference, CloudBees CTO Kohsuke Kawaguchi, the founder of Jenkins, told attendees that as they embrace DevOps they should be wary of creating CI islands within their organization. A more holistic approach to DevOps will enable organizations to harness a “gold mine” of metadata using analytics tools that will enable organizations to make more objective decisions about how best to accelerate application development and deployment.

The sharing of best DevOps practices will also be core to Boomiverse, an end user community that Boomi launched this week as part of an effort to increase the number of IT professionals that have Boomi certifications. In the last two years, Boomi has increased the number of certifications being attained from about five a day to now more than 40 as it makes a concerted effort to increase the amount of iPaaS integration expertise available to customers.

It’s not clear to what degree CI/CD platforms and API management ultimately will meld. It’s hard to imagine any organization trying to build and deploy cloud-native applications without having access to both platforms. In fact, most organizations now build, deploy and manage APIs as if they were a standalone application. As such, best DevOps practices are going to be required to manage APIs at scale. The challenge IT organizations now face is finding a way to teach the developers and IT operations teams responsible for building and deploying those APIs how best to work together collaboratively.

— Mike Vizard

October 3, 2019
Dell Boomi Reimagines iPaaS with Industry-Leading Intelligence, Blockchain Capabilities
Powered by more than 20TB of data and a new, unmatched user experience journey

https://boomi.com/press_release/dell-boomi-reimagines-ipaas-with-industry-leading-intelligence-blockchain/

LAS VEGAS – Boomi World 18 – November 6, 2018 – Dell Boomi™ (Boomi), the leading enterprise transformation provider of cloud integration and workflow automation to build The Connected Business, announced at Boomi World its product vision to reinvent the iPaaS industry. In the coming months, this vision will be incorporated into Boomi’s products, offerings and overall business strategy in order to continue to provide the best possible business outcomes for customers and partners.

As a foundational technology for business transformation, an iPaaS needs to do more than just integrate applications. It needs to provide connectivity across the entire business ecosystem – the company, its partners and customers – and connect applications, people and things. And it needs to do so in a seamless, efficient manner that drives high productivity and faster time to outcomes. Today, Boomi is the only iPaaS solution that offers a unified platform, including:
- Integrate – connect applications and data across your hybrid IT ecosystem
- Hub – synchronize and enrich trusted data with a single source of truth across your enterprise
- Exchange – manage your trading partner network using traditional EDI and modern web services protocols
- Mediate – design, secure and scale APIs through their entire lifecycle
- Flow – build customer journeys and automate simple and sophisticated workflows
Boomi’s reinvented iPaaS includes:
- Unmatched User Experience – Boomi understands that iPaaS is used by people with different levels of technical expertise, for a range of projects, from simple to complex. The new user experience (UX) is designed to meet every user – from Enterprise Architects to Citizen Integrators – at their level of expertise, and provide guidance best suited to the project or use case at hand. Users can focus on the problems they are looking to solve and can easily complete projects or achieve business outcomes. From HR and finance to sales and operations, fully formed guidance and suggestion routes are provided.
- Community Intelligence – In 2008, Boomi pioneered the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to simplify building and managing integration processes with Boomi Suggest, Boomi Resolve and Boomi Assure. Boomi’s vision builds on this foundation and incorporates intelligence into every step of the user’s journey, to enable them to complete their projects quickly and efficiently. With approximately 20 TB of anonymous metadata incorporated into the solutions’ intelligence, this pervasive knowledge is included in every aspect of the Boomi platform to help users be more productive. With the mindset of shared success, it shows users how to optimally configure Boomi for specific needs, based on feedback and insights from the community.
- Simplified Collaboration – Given the importance of team work, Boomi’s new UX is designed to support real time collaboration across users and teams, with requisite controls and tracking.
- Blockchain Integration – Boomi’s world class, unified platform offers support for industry-leading blockchain platforms Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric so customers will be ready to quickly and easily incorporate blockchain smart contracts into their business processes. During this time of the blockchain evolution, Boomi will be actively contributing to blockchain standards, and participating in various industry consortiums in order to influence the integration requirements customers will need to adopt blockchain.
“iPaaS is no longer just about integration, it is about pervasive connectivity and business transformation. If a business simply emphasizes the ability to integrate, then it is only focusing on a piece of the puzzle,” said Steve Wood, Chief Product Officer at Dell Boomi. “Boomi offers an iPaaS platform that delivers transformation by connecting people as well as data. The iPaaS of today will not be the iPaaS of tomorrow and it is Boomi’s vision to redefine the market in order to provide the best integration cloud technology to our customers and partners.”

“Flinders University prides itself for being an innovator in contemporary education and the source of Australia’s most enterprising graduates,” said Nicole Fishers, Associate Director, Digital Business Services & Deputy CIO at Flinders University. “We have recognized the vital need of progressive technology in the higher education industry and Boomi allows us to be connected across our entire organization. With more than 25,000 students, Boomi is helping us to provide them unprecedented access to information.”
November 6, 2018
Fusing iPaaS with DevOps: Synergistic Potential of Continuous Zero Code Integration

DevOps and integration platform as a service (iPaaS) are two dominant trends that together have cutting-edge use cases. Zero code integration could bring significant improvements to the DevOps life cycle, enabling efficient movement of applications from development to production. Implemented in the right way, both technologies can rewrite the way applications are developed.

DevOps is a Paradigm Shift

DevOps is a development approach based on continuous development and continuous integration to unify development and operations. The power of this approach has enabled behemoths such as Amazon and Netflix to leapfrog other players in their domains and set up an entirely new industry.

DevOps enables enterprises to manage the complete life cycle of applications from development to production in a faster and efficient way. In this way, teams can significantly accelerate the speed of application development life cycle.

In traditional ways of software development, IT and operations teams work in silos. To develop something, development needs to build codes, package everything and hand them over to a release manager. In the next stage, the release manager delivers the developed code to a test environment, where QA teams test the code and report the errors back to the development team. Developers again make changes and process them to the test environment. Then, again, the project is handed over to the development environment. This process entails a lot of handovers across organizational departments. Teams show resistance to changes coming down the road. Red-tape administration and the overhead involved in these activities slow down the development process.

All these hassles can be circumvented with the help of DevOps. In DevOps methodology, the development and testing teams work as one single team for the development of assets. The combined Development and Operations team achieves a balance to ensure that no efficiency is lost during the development process. All aspects of development testing, unit testing, integration testing, acceptance testing and production happen in a single environment. Small iterations are used to deliver usable products at the end of each sprint.

iPaaS for Transforming Monolithic Applications

iPaaS is an ingenious innovation for breaking down silos and ensuring operational efficiency and agility. It is a modern-day approach to automating integration between applications and marshaling them in an order. iPaas platforms bundle connectors, maps, and transformations to enable zero code integrations that are thrice more durable and efficient than conventional integrations. This unique advantage enables business teams to build integrations and lets IT teams to assume the governance role.

iPaaS solves a critical IT problem holding back organizations from leveraging their digital technologies: IT complexity. This problem was not present 15 or 20 years back, when enterprises had only three or four business systems. Enterprises used developer tools to combine applications and move data between source and target systems. They hand-coded connections for electronic data interchange. However, this method is not ideal for a scenario in which thousands of cloud and on-premises applications run in parallel. A lot of coding is required to build these integrations between these applications. Developers don’t have visibility to what other team members are building, and they create independent “islands of automation” and silos. Another relevant problem is updating integrations that remain in a constant flux.

All these challenges can be circumvented if integration becomes codeless and manageable by everyone involved. iPaaS provides custom development kits and pre-built accelerators to build ground-to-cloud integrations or cloud-to-ground integrations in a hybrid environment. Without writing a single line of code, teams can build integrations and establish a smoother symbiosis between differentiated applications. Zero code integration of iPaaS helps on four fronts: Integrate, Design, Monitor and Govern.

Harnessing the Vantage Point: Continuous Zero Code Integration

Real-time integration resides at the heart of both iPaaS platforms and DevOps methodologies. IPaaS can further strengthen the continuous integration muscle of DevOps. Teams can fuse iPaaS with DevOps for a transformative technological advancement called continuous zero code integration. This step can take continuous integration even one step closer to continuous integration.

IT and business teams can break down IT silos down the road and turbocharge the development process. Start-to-end integration between DevOps tools for other developers can fast forward the process of code development and code testing. A single intelligent mesh enables developers to integrate codes of developers and run them on a common build. Automated reporting ensures that developers are not stepping on each other’s code. Teams are able to make code updates or deliver things right into production hundreds or thousands of times a day.

Version control integration can be updated with the command center to provide fully automated provisioning. It further can be used to automate the entire standing. Development can be connected seamlessly with the version control system for a shared development environment in which shippable products can be developed. Individuals get a better look at their assets while working on them. This allows automation to run automation test units for frictionless development.

A microservices-based DevOps architecture is the most interesting part of DevOps and iPaaS fusion. This model has the potential to accelerate productivity significantly. Teams can deliver solutions much more quickly and access many business benefits downstream. Shorter build and deploy cycles improve deployability. It delivers the scalability to incorporate service-specific security, replication and monitoring in the build process. Fault-tolerant systems can be set up in which an error in one service affects only that respective system and not all services. Developers don’t have to use brute computational force for releasing new versions of a service. Loosely coupled microservices provide a greater degree of elasticity in the cloud. New frameworks, libraries, data sources and modular components support dynamic discovery and binding.

Any type of DevOps model can be driven by an iPaaS and their fusion should not be perceived as an enigma. Surely, there can be many more use cases out there. Melding the two for power and positive force is worth a closer look. This fusion can transcend application development in ways that are hard to imagine right now.

— Jitesh Banga

September 20, 2018
Why Your SaaS Ecosystem Isn’t Delivering

Cloud computing and -as-a-service deliverables such as SaaS have the potential to be transformational, but their value depends on whether you see them as tactical, single-purpose tools or as part of a larger and more strategically integrated ecosystem.

The cloud today is embraced almost universally at some level and seen as an essential component of nearly any enterprise, making it easier to enter new markets, transcend physical barriers and gain access to vital services. The most common, basic approach to SaaS may best be described as a JBOS approach, or “Just a Bunch of SaaS.” In this model, SaaS is used throughout the enterprise, but only as single-purpose tools, deployed to meet the needs of a particular siloed requirement. SaaS in that respect is a quick fix, a Band-Aid, lipstick on a pig—and it has not reached its full potential.

There is a point however, where SaaS and DevOps intersect—that point where an integration framework is superimposed over a SaaS catalog, and enterprise users now gain the advantage of each SaaS being part of a greater whole. At this point where SaaS apps and data become integrated strategically, we begin to see collaboration between IT professionals, developers and line-of-business managers; we see a higher level of automation; a more agile solution that takes full advantage of the cloud model; and finally, an overall cultural shift—all components of the DevOps movement.

SaaS’ Potential

The potential of SaaS is well-known and includes lower costs, agile sourcing and deployment, lower CapEx and more functionality to a wider group of users. But, the greater potential has been lost on many corporate users. IT is moving to the cloud, but is it doing so for the right reasons? By focusing on the “quick fix” aspect of SaaS, companies are missing out on the bigger picture. A more successful SaaS strategy defines the future of the business, using SaaS to stay agile and to align with business needs not just the individual SaaS instances but the entire SaaS ecosystem.

The greater potential of SaaS is achieved when it is deployed strategically, with an integration framework—and then the benefits go far beyond lower costs and CapEx. At that point, SaaS becomes transformational.

Unexpected Results

With all the potential, the rapid uptake of SaaS throughout the enterprise has had a few unexpected results. In addition to a marked increase in siloed information and isolated functionality that results from a lack of integration, the “dark data” phenomenon looms on the horizon, especially as the Internet of Things creates millions of new data points that never before existed. IBM Research’s John Kelly, known as the “Father of Watson,” noted recently at the San Francisco Cognitive Colloquium that 80 percent of data remains dark, and by 2020, the number will reach 93 percent.

With the vast majority of this unused data being generated from SaaS apps and IoT deployments, the unexpected result is an enormously untapped potential. Regardless of what the app’s intended purpose may be, who it was meant to benefit and which department deployed it, useful data is being orphaned at the source. In many cases, that data may have practical uses beyond the original intent, but those uses are never seen because it never escapes its own little corner of the enterprise.

In addition, incumbent integration platforms do not lend themselves to the cloud and lack the SaaS adapters necessary for ad hoc integration and line-of-business usage, and the solutions that do exist still lack tools for governance, API management and IoT integration support.

The Role of IT is Shifting

The IT department’s role is shifting dramatically. The need for agility and flexibility, along with a growing dependence on the cloud and as-a-service software, means IT no can longer continue its centralized role, lest the benefits of the cloud be thwarted. In a recent survey conducted by NetEnrich, respondents’ greatest concerns included IT is losing its relevance (18 percent) and business applications are crashing more because IT is not involved (22 percent).

While businesses recognize the shift, still, 39 percent are facing difficulty integrating traditional IT, cloud and DevOps, and there is no DevOps team in more than half of the IT departments surveyed.

The Solution

With more than half of companies lacking a DevOps team to accommodate the integration of traditional IT and the cloud, the most pressing need is to continue re-evaluating IT’s role from one of build-and-deliver to one of facilitator. Use of an as-a-service integration framework that can be guided by and facilitated by IT but used by ad hoc integrators or developers—whose specialization is not integration but have a need to connect applications and systems quickly from time to time—is the obvious next step to resolving the issues of a SaaS ecosystem that isn’t living up to its potential.

Such a framework can be deployed effectively using a bimodal, do-it-yourself integration approach. Those integration platforms that have begun to emerge may still be inadequate to accommodate the pervasive requirements of this major shift, since they still require IT specialists to manage the integration. The use of integration platform as a service (iPaaS) overcomes this limitation by providing a framework that empowers non-specialist IT users. Specifically, IT’s role as facilitator of this self-service platform comes into play by creating and maintaining the integration platform and a library of connectors, which then can be used not only by the integration specialists, but also by ad hoc integrators and “citizen integrators” or power users within the lines of business. As a result, the inefficient priesthood of IT is then replaced with a new balance of power between IT specialists, IT non-specialists and line-of-business users, encouraging more flexibility of integration in response to different priorities.

The iPaaS approach brings a new level of efficiency to the many new projects that are generating storms of data, such as IoT, and it supports a move away from the older IT approach that lacks the speed and agility required in today’s environment. To make the best use of SaaS, it’s time to rethink our approach and, through universal integration platforms, bring it out into the open.

About the Author/Renat Zubairov

Renat Zubairov is CEO and co-founder of elastic.io, a leading innovator in as-a-service integration.

May 2, 2016