I am in Las Vegas at the Gartner AADI Summit, which is shorthand for “Application Architecture, Development and Integration Summit.” Which, in turn, is shorthand for a bunch of technical people way smarter than me gathering to talk about things I can only pretend to understand.
This year’s theme is Empowering Innovation, Leading Transformation.As in, digital transformation, the buzzword du jour. It seems everybody wants to talk about digital business, digital disruption, and how to survive and even thrive in this new digital landscape.
Gartner is calling all IT leaders to stand up and take a leadership role in helping their companies transform into a digital business. One of the most important items on the digital transformation agenda is, of course, integration.
I sat through an extremely insightful session given by Gartner analysts, Massimo Pezzini and Ted Friedman. Pezzini traditionally covers application integration, while Friedman writes about data integration. But they presented together, because in their words, “the lines between integration are blurring.” The same project or initiative could involve aspects of B2B integration, application integration, and data integration. The default strategy, therefore, should be a hybrid integration platform, or HIP for short.
What is HIP? According to Gartner, a HIP is an integrated combination of on-premises application and data integration platforms, IPaaS, ISaaS, and API management, with a healthy dash of self-service provisioning to satisfy the “citizen integrators” of the world.
To the non-technical layperson unfamiliar with industry jargon (like me), this sounded like Gartner recommending something salacious, as the talk was all “hip and ass.” (IPaaS is pronounced eye-pass, while iSaaS is pronounced eye-sass). I guess that’s why my ears perked up and I listened so intently.
By doing this, I actually learned something: the tool you choose should fit the people doing the integration (sometimes these are integration specialists, other times they are ad hoc integrators, and still other times they are business users taking matters into their own hands, or citizen integrators) as well as the time to value (how soon the project needs to drive business benefits) and the security requirements. For example, an ISaaS fits well when there is an ultra-short time to value and modest security requirements, whereas an on-premises integration platform would fit best in scenarios that can tolerate a long time to value but comes with much higher security requirements.
Pezzini and Friedman prescribed 3 steps for companies to take in order to best set themselves up for success for integration in a hybrid world:
- 1.Choose a hybrid integration platform as the default strategy;
- 2.Get good at governance;
- 3.Track exceptions.
Makes sense to me! I was gratified to find Adeptia listed both as an iSaaS and an on-prem integration platform. I would be remiss as a marketer not to close by saying that if you are looking for a HIP with a bit of -aaS, please contact us at Adeptia…we’ve got you covered.