Organizations today have various applications for different functionalities, APIs, services, devices etc. all acquired in an effort to improve the business. These assets reside within the organization or externally, on different clouds and so on. The different assets are many and yet, the experience needs to seamless and data needs to flow unhindered between different applications or services. Enter Application Integration.
Application integration allows individual applications to work with one another to achieve collaborations that modernizes an organization’s infrastructures and support agile business operations. With agile integration, organizations can quickly take advantage of new business opportunities, create new capabilities and insights and so on.
At Envision Global, we work closely with our clients to understand and map out their landscape of different applications and services that need to talk to each other, or new ones that need to be created to make integration simple so as to achieve organizational benefits, be it to create a seamless customer experience, create new digital channels, provide more information to internal and external users and so on. We then come up with a strategy to get our clients where they want to go and execute to achieve the desired end goal. We heavily focus on Agile Integration which is mainly powered by container-based integration.
We focus on the following integration areas:
Good APIs or Programming Application Interfaces provide invaluable integration benefits to an organization. Key among them is that APIs allow 2 or more applications and/services to communicate while abstracting the underlying implementations. which in itself provides a myriad of benefits. Using APIs simplifies development of applications as developers no longer have to start from scratch but can instead use APIs which make repeatable processes reusable. This allows businesses to take advantage of changing business landscape much more quickly, among many other benefits. In addition, APIs allow organizations to open up data to external third-party developers, to business partners and even internal departments within their company. Some of the advantages of this can include API monetization. To learn more about APIs Click here
At Envision Global, we work with our clients to develop a robust API strategy, which would be a fit into the wider digital and the organizational strategy at large. In addition, we also assist our clients with putting in place the right API architecture with proper governance and security. Once all the pre-requisites are in place, we work with the client to select the right fit in terms of platform and tools actualize the desired end state. Our teams will deploy, configure and support the solutions to meet the set-out objectives and standards. We also offer the necessary hands-on training for the client team and ongoing proactive support so our clients can continually keep improving and taking maximum benefits of the investment.
By implementing API Management, organizations can look to gaining the following benefits among many others:
For organizations that are already using APIs, we work together to refine the API strategy to continually improve and take advantage of new opportunities.
To empower our clients to benefit from APIs both internally and externally, we support the solutions below
Traditionally, ESB has been a key part in implementing Service Oriented Architecture SOA). According to IBM, SOA defines a way to make software components reusable via service interfaces. These interfaces utilize common communication standards in such a way that they can be rapidly incorporated into new applications without having to perform deep integration each time. The centralized ESB software performs integrations to backend systems and makes those integrations available as a service interfaces for reuse by new applications.
The above approach, described at a high level, was implemented successfully in the past until the ESB became a bottleneck in implementation of SOA. As described by “…IBM, Making changes or enhancements to one integration often destabilized others. Updates to the ESB middleware often impacted existing integrations. Because the ESB was centrally managed, applications teams soon found themselves waiting in line for their integrations…”. Therefore, while the benefits of having in place an ESB are still there and integral in the integration strategy of any organization, there is a need to relook at how the ESB is implemented so as to empower and not clog the enterprise.
It is with this in mind that at Envision Global, we work with our clients to assess their readiness, develop a roadmap and assist them to integrate their application and services to realize the benefits of the ESB using agile integration approach.
As Red Hat aptly put it, “innovation needs integration, and it needs it at a speed that matches your current development practices”. Agile Integration can be thought of as a container-based, decentralized and microservices-aligned approach for integration solutions. This approach eliminates the traditional centralized, monolithic approach to an ESB. We work very closely with our clients to put them on this new path to improve operations and serve internal and external customers quickly and efficiently.
By implementing an ESB, our clients stand to gain the following main business benefits:
To assist our clients to benefit from all the benefits of agile integration, we support the platforms below.
To assist our clients to benefit from all the benefits of agile integration, we support the solutions below.