FINAL WORD
“
WHAT IT BOSSES
MAY NOT BE
THINKING
ABOUT IS THAT
MUCH OF THE
ANSWER TO THE
INTEGRATION
QUESTION
LIES IN
MIDDLEWARE.
many organisations uncover an integration
problem, which amounts to a spaghetti-like
tangle of siloed systems and data sources
that have built up over time. It can be hard
to know where to start with untangling
the plethora of disparate systems and
data sources when looking to develop new
applications that must plug into them.
What’s more, many legacy apps were
not made for the cloud and redesigning
them is far from cost-efficient. In addition,
many businesses are looking to develop
new applications using microservices and
containers. A total of 36% of respondents
to survey were in the process of researching
or planning to deploy microservices
architectures in the next year and 29%
indicated they were already implementing
or using them. The figures were even
higher for containers: 38% in planning,
33% implementing.
104
INTELLIGENTCIO
Operation integration: the tech
behind the scenes
As organisations seek to modernise
their application environments, a crucial
consideration is being able to bridge old and
new technologies in a safe and meaningful
way. That is, successfully maintaining
existing applications while harnessing the
benefits of new agile architectures and tools.
What IT bosses may not be thinking
about is that much of the answer to the
integration question lies in middleware. It
is the tech you do not see, working to solve
diverse and complex problems behind the
scenes in systems like holiday bookings,
electronic ticketing and payment card fraud
detection. Middleware technologies can
integrate these systems and share the data
that is spread across multiple applications
and processes. They also empower users
with automated business processes and
rules that help an organisation respond
rapidly to changing conditions.
By tidying up the back end, as well as
providing a platform to build applications
on, integration middleware can help
accelerate the delivery of new services to
employees and customers. And it enables
the organisation to do this agnostic of
environment and device, providing the
flexibility to deploy applications on premise,
in the cloud, or a combination of both, and
spanning the range of devices critical to
today’s organisations.
For delivery specialist Hermes, integration
middleware is a means to better track
delivery information for customers, a two-
hour process of manually batching data
and pushing out into customer-facing web
applications has been automated and now
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