Enable Business Transformation with Integration

According to Gartner – “Organizations need to move from task-specific tools toward a hybrid integration platform. By 2022, 65% of large enterprises will have implemented a hybrid integration platform“.

The essence of digital transformation when you look at it through the lens of integration can be categorised into the following main categories:

1. Connect/engage with your customers, prospects
2. Empower employees through mobile apps, self-service portals, etc.
3. Transform products, become service oriented business
4. Operational optimizations, financial consolidation and integrations with 3^rd party systems

If you are in IT department of the big organization, cloud can become one more headache for you in terms of integration – for example, how do you connect your on premise database with service in the cloud, how do you use bespoke build transformation logic in order to pass messages to SAAS applications in the cloud. You need agility, flexibility, speed, productivity and usage/roll-out simplicity. Change is always hard and business transformation is all about the change. And so, more and more technologies come along and more services are offered or built will lead to more and more integrations required.

Common integration scenarios:

1. Application to application (Intelligent automation, file based, protocol based, etc.)
2. Business to business (EDI, X12, EDIFACT, AS2, RosettaNet)
3. SaaS
4. IoT
5. BI, MDM

Common integration challenges:

1. Interfaces and APIs
2. Data sources and formats
3. Service oriented and distributed
4. On-premise or cloud

These integrations create a platform for business transformation and it becomes business critical component along with other applications business depends on. Azure is built to handle business critical applications, however you also require a highly resilient integrations as well.

Value is realised when applications are integrated with one another but it also lost when not connected. Moreover, critical business processes can be blocked. To eliminate that bottle neck Microsoft offer includes whole Integration Platform As A Service. IPAAS from Microsoft consists of API Management, Logic Apps, Service Bus and Event Grid which all together can provide the following main benefits:

1. API economy (not just build and use integration APIs within your organization, but monetise by exposing it to 3^rd parties, etc.)
2. Flexibility and scalability in your platform
3. SaaS, mobile apps, etc.
4. Help to enables digital transformation

Here is a great video from Microsoft with more details how you can use Azure as an integration platform: