In the current competitive times, organizations in every industry must transform their ways of doing business to survive and thrive. According to research, disruption in the business world has significantly sped up the adoption of digital technologies. Those organizations that considered themselves successful in responding to disruption encompassed technology capabilities that others did not – including self-service integration and automation.
Because companies are weighed down with traditional, complex, costly technologies, such as the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), transformation is almost impossible.
A few years ago, ESB solutions were regarded as revolutionary, and businesses relied on them to connect applications to one another. It required companies to hire IT integrators and senior developers to write custom code using SOAP to connect data and applications to a communication bus. Also, these developers needed to encode business logic in these connections.
Developers found it difficult to code. But the bus supposedly offered a secure, comprehensive thoroughfare for the data that applications and business units depend on.
When new business opportunities arose, new competitors came into being, or regulations changed, and a business unit suddenly was required to revise its business logic in response, the organization would need to find the time as well as budget to write, test, and leverage new software for the ESB.
As the world of business gained pace from the first decade to the second, the impracticality of this approach became painfully obvious.
Today, ESBs are still around. Multiple companies still use them. The question is whether these companies should continue using ESB or adopt a faster approach to data integration.
ESBs Slow Companies Down
Many companies are investing as much as 70% of their IT budgets to maintain conventional, hand-coded, brittle ESB integrations and outdated applications, rather than adopting new data integration solutions that could transform their businesses.
ESBs create the following problems for organizations:
Complexity: The complexity of this modernization component becomes clear once one garners all the release notes for different products that make up an ESB offering from a single vendor. The printed release notes, including API guides and programming tutorials, require long hours of reading. An ESB vendor currently provides six different versions of the product, and integrations have to be constantly revised to traverse from version to version.
Increased IT Intervention: Legacy ESB solutions require IT teams to implement long custom codes and perform extensive data mappings to build integrations. That requires six to 12 weeks of calendar time. Meanwhile, customers are forced to wait to connect with business workers and have their needs met. As a result, customers become unhappy and refrain from doing business with the company again.
An Obsolete Technology: Fewer companies are deploying ESBs, making ESB programmers much more rare and costly. In fact, companies are switching to modern solutions such as self-service data integration and automation to implement new data connections and deliver the value promised to customers.
Impact of Self-Service Data Integration
Self-service data integration solutions enable companies to empower non-technical business users to implement new data connections in minutes instead of months. Users can rely on features, such as pre-built application connectors, shared templates, dashboards and intuitive screens, AI-data mapping, and more, to create new customer data connections in minutes.
Non-technical users need to point and click through easy-to-navigate screens to onboard customers 80 percent faster.
Now, when business workers can connect with customers so quickly, the waiting times experienced by customers reach a bare minimum. That is to say, companies can deliver on customers’ demands faster, turning them happy and satisfied. Such happy customers bring in more revenue as they are more likely to buy more products or services from the company. Further, IT becomes free to focus on other important business priorities.
Companies relying on ESB for integration will certainly not go that far. They need to embrace reimagined data integration technologies such as self-service data integration to embrace the shift happening in the business world and deliver maximum value.