The current era of technology is expeditious. IT landscape is changing every day with an influx of new technologies, software products and devices. The need to integrate or connect is the driving force for digitization.
Nowadays, application developers, line of business (LOB) IT services and business users (aka “citizen integrators”) are involved in integration work, which is a substantial changeover compared to the old school way of working, where dedicated specialists used to perform integration work. Gartner calls it “pervasive integration”.
There is an explosion of SaaS and PaaS, coupled with mobile, big data and IoT, making the IT world much superior to what it used to be. This also leads to a mindset change of adopting an integration platform, instead of having multiple products which caters to all integration needs.
As Gartner defines it, Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) is a suite of cloud services enabling development, execution and governance of integration flows connecting any combination of on-premises and cloud-based processes, services, applications and data within individual or across multiple organizations.
Cloud-based integration solutions are disruptive and strategic, as they enable transformation of integration platforms thus making both business and IT leaner, more agile and more capable in terms of infrastructure setup and management, high availability of services, security, regulatory compliances etc.
In the quest to support cutting-edge requirements, Software AG has been revamping its product portfolio. As a result, it endorses a platform (Digital Business Platform) which not only digitalizes a part of the IT infrastructure of an enterprise, rather, transforms it overall.
As Software AG describes it, “Digital Business Platform is nothing but an integrated set of technologies and tools to manage the Digital Transformation and to implement new Business Designs”. With a co-innovation process powered by design thinking, business and IT work hand-in-hand focusing on customer success.
In this blog we will be looking at Software AG’s webMethods Integration Cloud, and its capabilities.
Software AG webMethods Integration Cloud
webMethods Integration Cloud is an integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) that connects cloud-based and on-premises applications and enables rapid deployment to the cloud.
Capabilities
API Management
webMethods Integration Cloud provides all possible features when you think of APIs, right from design, develop, test, publish and maintain. API portals enable you to expose your APIs to both inside and outside world. The API gateway keeps them secure and the platform provides a 360 degree view on the entire API lifecycle management. Related API Management content:
- Blog: Why invest in API Management?
- Blog: Axway API Management – An introduction
- Offering: API Management
- White paper: The future of API Management
- Case: API Management at Liberty Global
Integration capabilities
It includes cloud-based applications such as Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Amazon Web Services and more. A number of pre-built connectors that uses various protocols like SOAP, FTP/SFTP, ODATA, etc. and palettes which provides rich data transformation capabilities makes integration much easier.
Service orchestration
webMethods Integration Cloud offers a graphical user interface which comprises drag and drop palettes which helps to create simple and sophisticated nested integrations and orchestration flows without any coding.
Tenant, Role and Stage Management
Key capabilities like tenant registration, user and role management allows managed access to the integration environments. It also provides capability to manage different development environments within which the applications can be migrated allowing a rigorous software development life cycle on cloud.
Multi-tenant architecture
Integration Cloud is fully multi-tenant. Each tenant gets a separate production instance of the integration cloud and communication between execution instance and tenants are done using web-based user interface.
Monitoring & Reporting
Real time dashboards which depict the performance and execution history. An entire audit trail and error logs are visible for transaction history and compliance.
To conclude
With the current changes made to their integration product portfolio, I feel that Software AG has positioned themselves in a good place with the right mindset focused on helping their customers to have an overall digital transformation.
In the next blog, we will see more about webMethods Integration Cloud’s deployment patterns, compliance with microservices and DevOps.
