Navigating a paradigm shift and cultural change in integration.

Integration is a prominent layer in all enterprises, and it is one that is evolving. Today, many enterprises focus on becoming cloud-ready and adopting newer digital technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud, and Big Data to bring their customers a more seamless and superior digital experience. To meet these growing and challenging demands, the focus of integration has shifted from on-premises to hybrid cloud and from service-oriented architecture (SOA) to decentralized Agile-based containerization frameworks.

This paradigm shift has necessitated a cultural change in the way integration is managed and has provided a unique opportunity to rediscover and simplify the integration journey.

Technology is changing

Business transformation usually happens at a broad level, with technology as the backbone. Legacy modernization, cloud-first approaches, and adoption of newer digital technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), IoT, and Big Data all present the same key challenges:

• How can we build a superior customer experience by unlocking the value of an existing system of records?
• How can we innovate with cloud integration, cognitive, and AI services?
• How can we create next-gen systems with speed?

The success of your enterprise transformation depends on the following key factors:

1. Quick and easy integration: Reduce the complexity and build new integration rapidly.
2. Adoption of newer ways of integration: Microservices, event-based, and IPaaS.
3. Agility: In development, deployment, and operations.

Therefore, enterprises have started focusing on building next-gen digital integration platforms. 

Integration is changing

To adapt to next-gen digital integration, winning organizations focus on shifting from product-based solutions to a platform-based approach instead of assimilating different integration products.

In order to stay ahead of new demands and be future-ready, organizations require a platform that can cater to end-to-end integration needs and run in an open and flexible environment. The IBM Cloud Pak® for Integration is a next-gen integration platform that helps support a wide range of agile integration requirements, like cloud integration, API-first strategy, microservices, containers, hybrid cloud, and more.

The IBM Cloud Pak for Integration platform provides the flexibility of being able to run part of the workload inside a virtual machine (VM) and the other part inside containers. This allows the customer to achieve the best of both traditional and cloud native abilities.

The solution approach is changing

The transition from traditional, on-premises, centrally managed integration platforms to a next-gen digital integration containerized setup entails a huge shift for numerous enterprises. Many organizations look to IBM business partners for help to navigate this shift. Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is one such longstanding IBM partner, with over a decade of proven integration experience.

TCS is a member of the IBM cloud ecosystem, a new initiative to support global system integrators and independent software vendors to help clients modernize and transform mission-critical workloads with IBM cloud technologies. To help customers simplify and rapidly modernize their integration platform with state-of-the-art accelerators and tools, TCS has recently released a new Jumpstart kit for Integration.

The TCS Jumpstart kit for Integration encompasses the IBM Cloud Pak for Integration platform spread across different levels of integration, including cloud integration, API-first strategy, microservices, containers, and hybrid cloud. It provides a comprehensive offering, enabling simplification and faster adoption of the platform.

The TCS Jumpstart kit for Integration includes the TCS Jumpstart Portal, which provides a common repository of all the integration modernization offerings and solutions under one roof. Solutions and assets within the TCS Jumpstart kit for Integration span across different integration modernization phases. They cover areas like the assessment of the current integration landscape, creation of blueprints covering granular details of integration modernization, recommendations on target deployment architecture, return on investments, and best practices. Furthermore, the kit supplements tools and accelerators for code refactoring and deploys the refactored workload to the target state using DevOps automation. All these solutions are integrated and can be executed with the click of a button.

These services and solutions are the outcome of a series of brainstorming sessions between TCS, industry leaders, and architects to help the customers and account teams modernize their integration journey.

The way forward

Building a next-gen digital integration platform is about decentralization, containerization, and an event-driven approach. Enterprises are shifting towards a robust platform-centric approach that covers these aspects and enables modernization at their own pace and ability to scale, while driving faster innovation and extensibility.

The IBM Cloud Pak® for Integration offers a comprehensive integration platform around application and data integration, covering different aspects of messaging (IBM MQ and IBM Event Streams), legacy and cloud integration (iPaaS), and high-speed file transfer (Aspera).

The TCS Jumpstart kit for Integration simplifies the integration modernization journey and helps enterprises quickly adapt and apply the IBM Cloud Pak for Integration by leveraging ready-to-use tools and accelerators, thereby greatly reducing the cost of transformation and total cost of ownership.