Businesses attempting to accomplish ambitious digital transformation initiatives need to design an evolving business strategy. Creating a business strategy that evolves is like upgrading a car. The entire attention falls on incorporating new looks, improving efficiency, and accelerating speeds. But quite often we fail to look under the hood even though here is where the power building source “the engine” resides.
Business ecosystems need to look under the hood to drive digital transformation, thereby deepening customer relationships, fostering agility, and building new revenue streams. Such top-level improvements can be ensured by employing best-of-the-breed integration technologies that serve an elementary role in binding different technology initiatives together, making the combined output or business outcome comparatively greater than the sum of its parts.
However, current integration platforms are incapable of coping with complexities posed by digital transformation. In such cases, organizations need to bring a radical change in integration technology, and in ways, they deal with involved ambiguities as well as resistance. This helps organizations to embrace transformation while eliminating risks of institutional pushback.
Platform Approach to Deal with Increased Complexity
Organizations need seamless connectivity with data in order to meet varying customer demands and needs. With digital transformation gaining surge, data 4Vs (volume, veracity, velocity, and variety) is witnessing an exponential increase. This overwhelming growth gives rise to myriad complexities and challenges including, application failures, reduced efficiency and performance, and more. Conventional integration platforms, a set of task-specific integration technologies, lack capability and precision to address this level of complexity. So, enterprises need a holistic approach, one that uses a hybrid integration platform for curbing the challenges posed by the enormous growth of data and driving digital transformation initiatives in an organization.
Path to a Hybrid Integration Platform (HIP)
Prior to deploying a HIP, organizations need to have a good strategy in place. A sound HIP strategy needs to take two specific dimensions into account. Here are they:
First, hybrid integration platform needs to support four significant paradigms – personas or constituents that include digital integrators, integration specialists, citizen integrators, and ad hoc integrators, endpoints that include cloud, on-premises devices, and IoT devices, integration domains that include B2B process, application and data, and deployment models that include IoT devices, on-premises devices, the cloud, and mobile devices.
Second, companies need to deeply analyze their integration capabilities that are already in place. In addition, they have to define expected integration needs across three-time frames: the next 12 months, the next thirty-six months, and the next sixty months.
Get on the Hybrid Integration Bandwagon
Adopting a hybrid integration platform helps organizations scale integration by empowering ecosystems of developers and integrators while maintaining corporate oversight to data. Additionally, HIP provides agility as it enables organizations to adapt and innovate at scale.
Further, with business venturing into co-creation, it is the hybrid integration platform that allows companies to gain access to all data channels and ensure seamless connectivity.
Hybrid integration platforms allow businesses to obtain and analyze data from different sources/applications and manage them from a single center. Such centralized risk management of shared data eliminates concerns regarding data safety. To add, owing to the presence of a centralized platform, companies do not need to acquire multiple complicated integration tools that reduce the amount of hardware used and cut overhead costs further.
Hence, for organizations making an effort to accomplish their digital transformation goals, the necessity of establishing a hybrid integration model remains undisputed.
Make sure to embark on this journey at the earliest as it is highly unlikely that you will be alone.
Godspeed!