ipaas Not Just about Connectors Anymore by Arijit Dey, Principal Software Engineer, CA Technologies

Transcription

1 About the author Arijit Dey is a Principal Software Engineer at CA Technologies and based in Hyderabad. At CA, he has been part of the CA Clarity PPM product development team and is currently working for the design and development of Clarity Playbook product. Arijit has over nine years of experience in the software industry and has worked extensively in the enterprise middleware and integration platforms. As a technical architect at Cordys, he had implemented various Cordys platform based customer solutions, mainly in the banking and insurance sector. Arijit has co-authored multiple patent applications at CA Technologies. Arijit holds a Bachelor of Technology degree in Electronics with specialization in communication designs. ipaas Not Just about Connectors Anymore by Arijit Dey, Principal Software Engineer, CA Technologies Bewildered, curious, I wonder along the shore I hold my breath, for the ocean to roar, Purple clouds, I see them painting my sky Bearing light shade for me as they fly, I wait for the showers, to quench my thirst To wash off my pain, it must, I hear the rain thunder, flail and cry And Alas! I see it not hail under, but fly high To the clouds above, dancing in the sky! Well! I do not intend to try my stroke of luck becoming a poet or a writer, but my poetic surge is very much analogous to the immensely impressive growth of cloud computing- from merely some industry buzz to the reality of today. The Software as a Service delivery model has proven its mettle and has been widely adopted and appreciated as the most successful cloud service model so far. The trend is very fast moving, where IT (Information Technology) service consumers are using cloud services at a tremendous pace and the trend is not just centered on small or medium scale enterprises but has penetrated into large enterprises as well. Cloud services are empowering users through self-service and low total cost of ownership, enabling users to seamlessly integrate across all devices- whether they are at home, at work, at coffee shops, or anywhere else. Businesses are outsourcing their non-core services to the cloud to allow additional focus on their core businesses. IT cannot isolate itself from this dramatic change in the service delivery models. The continuous rise of user self-empowerment and increased cloud adoption will further increase the complexity of IT management. IT needs to accelerate its response to match business demands while simultaneously managing the issues of security, compliance and regulation. SaaS applications are business-problem-focused applications; they only cater to a very narrow line of business. A single SaaS application cannot fulfil all the IT service requirements; we are still awaiting an era where we would have Enterprise as a Service. SaaS provides a point solution, a component of the overall IT landscape. It is therefore inevitable that SaaS applications should fit and communicate with other components in the enterprise IT stack - those onpremise and other applications in the cloud, to become part of the overall business processes of the enterprise. The current emphasis should be on building hybrid business processes encompassing the disparate sources. This is underpinning the need to rethink integration and middleware. SaaS adoption and cloud service usage are rapidly evolving and engaging more and more of the consumers. The need for integration to bring these cloud silos together and bind them into business processes has increased manifold in complexity, enormity and scalability. One option is to have an on-premise

2 integration middleware solution to solve the perennial issues of integration and orchestration- the kind of problems Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) middleware promised to solve, but enterprises need a more flexible, scalable and faster integration solution- a solution which can allow businesses to react to demands faster and at the same time with lower cost of ownership. Enter the age of ipaas- Integration Platform as a Service where Integration overcomes the force of gravity and lands itself on the Cloud. ipaas is not just another Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) on cloud (though its genesis lies in ESB) but it represents a suite of cloud services which will enable integration between cloud to cloud services and applications, as well as on-premise and cloud services, thereby providing a platform to the consumers to perform the development, execution and management of integration flows. ipaas will be a fast and flexible integration approach, as it will provide the requisite scalability, performance and reduced IT operation burden. At first sight, the proposition looks definitely attractive- subscription based usage, in-built multi-tenancy, and scalable infrastructure management, since ipaas itself can leverage the proven infrastructure cloud services. So, what capabilities will ipaas bring to the table to support successful integration implementation? Or should I ask, what is being expected from ipaas apart from the usual cloud based service capabilities? The list can be a long one, trust me! ipaas must offer now or should build over time capabilities such as message transformation, routing, security federation, protocol conversion, tracking and monitoring, SOA enablement and federation, and of course governance services like repository and service discovery, life cycle management and policy management, and enforcement. All of these capabilities need to be offered in scalable and self-service fashion with assured service level agreements. The next series of questions that instantly arise are: Do we need a dinosaur integration platform which performs all these functions? Can an integration platform handle the complexity and transaction load of a typical B2B integration? Can ipaas replace the on-premise heavyweight integration middleware solutions which already exist? Before we attempt to address these questions, we should understand some of the enterprise realities today and the challenges they present. Today, enterprise data is fragmented between on-premise legacy systems and cloud services. Cloud services alone do not define the overall enterprise s business processes. For example, the sales order process may encompass Salesforce cloud software to an on-premise SAP system. Another aspect which is gaining momentum is collaborative business models, where enterprises are increasingly collaborating with business partners and developer communities to open up new sales channels. This is driving increased sharing of data and processes among these entities. Furthermore, enterprises are shifting gears towards enterprise mobility and data aggregation so that they can provide business value to the right consumers at the right time on the right device. Enterprises are modernizing their legacy systems and core business

3 solutions which cannot become extinct overnight because they drive the core business processes. These legacy systems nevertheless now need to be exposed to the partner community and third-party developers to accelerate innovation and market value. Enterprises will want to define their business processes which orchestrate services across firewall boundaries and they will want to expose these processes to a larger community. The consequences of all these factors include: Business processes will span both on-premise and cloud services. Data security requirements will be more demanding and more federated. Enterprises will need real-time integration so that users can view and update information to multiple applications at the same time. As more and more services will be consumed from the cloud, from varyingly different vendors and providers, governance and management will be one of the key focus areas. Enterprises will look for more analytical insights into their data for more informed decision making. These business needs are sending a very clear signal that if ipaas is limited to application or data connectors and a platform to define integration flows alone, it cannot add any significant value to the overall integration strategy and its successful execution for any enterprise. I see ipaas also as an Operations Platform on cloud where it equips the enterprise to efficiently: 1. Bring organizations different IT assets, be it applications, data, tools under one umbrella. 2. Simplify the process of managing services right from the stage of planning and development to the retiring of services. 3. Close the gap between IT and business by allowing business users to plan, design and execute business processes and introduce process improvements and changes as per changing business needs. 4. Provide more insight and transparency into the efficiency of operations through advanced reporting and analytics thereby enabling operations intelligence. One can argue that the above proposition of an operations platform is more process-centric and does not address the needs of collaborative business model. The answer can be both yes and no as on one hand operational efficiency is fundamental to any enterprise-level initiative whereas on the other hand building an ecosystem around the business is equally important for growth. ipaas is envisioned to provide the best of both worlds. So, essentially ipaas should play the role of a mediator which would support the dynamic nature of business operations by providing users the necessary tools like: Business user-friendly visual service orchestration tools to combine integrated services from different systems and applications- across firewall boundaries and expose these flows as services enabling the building of more composite process flows.

4 Activity monitoring tools to provide real time insight into the business data flows enabling the measurement and improvements of key business metrics. Pre-defined automated integration packs which enable faster integration implementation. And at the same time, ipaas should provide a strong platform for the management and governance of the business services and provide these services to the business partners and developer community as a whole to support the business agility and new growth channels through an extended ecosystem. Management and governance includes the entire life cycle aspects starting from the process of designing, developing, deploying and provisioning and retiring of services and other crucial aspects such as security, scalability and performance. Since we are talking about the externalization of the enterprise through services, it is inevitable that we talk about Application Programming Interfaces (API). Similar to the dot com boom, now we are witnessing the API boom. APIs are allowing enterprises to open up internal data and business functionality to developer community and partners thereby creating new distribution channels for its business capabilities. The popularity of APIs is increasing because of it s easy to use nature and the value they bring to reach the customers through multiple point of access like mobile, tablets and this in turn is fuelling the growth in the API management solution market. API management provides the necessary infrastructure required to expose and manage the APIs to internal and external consumers. API management provides a suite of tools like the developer portal, which enable the discovery of APIs, its usage, and notifications on changes and new APIs availability; secure API gateway to manage the access to the APIs, authentication, metering, usage throttling, and most importantly tools to manage the life cycle of the APIs- from development to deployment to versioning. Now, if we look at the capabilities offered by API management solutions, we will see that they are very similar to the management and governance aspects of the integration platform solutions. APIs are after all services which are made available to the external developer ecosystem, so its management is just like the management of SOA services when we look at them as assets. We have actually started seeing this unification happening, ipaas vendors are now adding or acquiring API management solutions and embedding them in their integration platform solutions. The evolution is a logical one; APIs alone cannot drive the initiatives enterprises are taking towards digitization of assets and mobility. API management solutions cannot thrive independently because as APIs will become more and more complex and will require more involved access to enterprise data (not to mention, fragmented data across applications and systems), a sound mediation layer will be required to expose a unified view through the API. Over the last couple years, we saw many ipaas vendors adding API management capabilities, either through acquisitions or building their own. Intel s acquisition of Mashery API management platform with whom Intel was already partnering to

5 provide Intel Expressway API manager 1, MuleSoft s acquisition of ProgrammableWeb 2, and CA s acquisition of Layer 7 API management solution 3 are all noteworthy. We also saw ipaas vendors extending their platform to offer API management capabilities; for example, Dell Boomi expanded the capabilities to include API management 4 and SnapLogic s latest ipaas update includes support for API management. 5 These developments in the ipaas and API management solution market space are a clear indication of the future unification of integration platforms and API management platforms to help enterprises implement their API programs and mobile initiatives through more streamlined enterprise integration, common service life cycle, and common runtime gateways. The interesting aspect to note is can independent API management solution providers survive the metamorphism which is happening to ipaas platforms into full-fledged API management solutions? Can API Management and Integration Platform on Cloud interplay with each other or outplay the other? The ipaas market is still in its early growth phase and will surely continue to evolve with new features and capabilities. It will definitely be a preferred integration solution for hybrid integration scenarios and will allow enterprises to have a common platform to manage all its services- both for internal and external consumption. While the investments in existing SOA middleware will still exist to support complex B2B integration scenarios and to support high transaction load integration requirements within the corporate firewall, ipaas will build on the experience and excellence gained from SOA to allow enterprises have a successful integration implementation on the cloud. References 1 intels_acquisition_of_mashery_nets_it_public_api_smarts_developers_and_more Expands-SaaS-Library

6 Connect with CA Technologies at ca.com CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) helps customers succeed in a future where every business from apparel to energy is being rewritten by software. From planning to development to management to security, at CA we create software that fuels transformation for companies in the application economy. With CA software at the center of their IT strategy, organizations can leverage the technology that changes the way we live from the data center to the mobile device. Learn more about CA Technologies at CA. All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies. ITIL is a Registered Trade Mark of AXELOS Limited. The statements and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of CA. CA and the authors assume no responsibility for consequences resulting from the publication of or use of this document, and are not responsible for, and expressly disclaim liability for, damages of any kind.