This article explains some options to take now that you have an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) fully implemented. These thoughts and options hold true for any ESB, though some specific integration points will be reviewed between these options and IBM Integration Bus (formally WebSphere Message Broker). Also, in no way am I suggesting that you replace your ESB or think of it as no longer needed. An ESB is a critical component of a hybrid integration architecture. If you have a fully implemented Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), then that is a good thing, as you can exploit those services in the hybrid integration world of today (and I will cover the difference between web APIs and SOA as part of a future post).

There are three primary trends driving the integration market today.

Businesses are now living in a hybrid world and need to be able to tap into everything they have to create new systems of engagement. IT integration teams using an ESB today are under pressure to reduce cost of integration and to change to support digital transformation issues or be bypassed. They want tooling that enables digital transformation initiatives but still fits with IT strategies and architectures. Also very importantly, they want to derive additional value for the integration layer and to be able to easily demonstrate to the business the value the integration layer provides.

So what does hybrid integration mean?

The emergence of big data, cloud, mobile and the Internet of Things is forcing you to rethink your concept of integration. Today, to remain competitive, you need to be able to integrate internally and externally—connecting sensors, customers and partners with the information in your systems of record. You need to Integrate with Everything.

Our world is moving faster than ever, especially in technology. Keeping up to date is not good enough anymore; you need a way to stay ahead. Today’s market is driven by connectivity between people, devices, and companies. This connectivity creates advantages across every end of the spectrum, and provides real opportunities to reinvent your business practices.

You need to capitalize on new technologies to their fullest intent, integrating them with the institutional knowledge you have been building for years. Integration with data and applications provides the ability to seamlessly move between on premises and new cloud solutions. This allows you to connect to new endpoints, respond to new requirements, and quickly engage with your enterprise systems to unlock powerful insights and operate at speeds to foster innovation and drive results.

With hybrid integration, businesses can integrate systems that reside both on-premises and in the cloud to create connectivity across the enterprise.

Gartner has defined "pervasive integration" as the act of integrating on-premises and in-the-cloud applications and data sources, business partners, clients, mobile apps, social networks and "things" as needed to enable organizations to pursue digital business, bimodal IT and other modern business and technology strategies. The proliferation and growing importance of decentralized integration tasks — driven by these business and IT trends — are forcing directors of integrations to rethink their approaches, organizational models and technology platforms (Gartner: Pezzini, Thompson, Guttridge, & Golluscio, 2016).

However, businesses faces challenges moving to hybrid service enabled architectures. They have current investment and data locked in backend systems, little experience with cloud as an interaction tier, and limited knowledge and skill to implement transformational projects. It is said that by 2016, 50% of B2B collaboration will take place through Web APIs, and by 2018, 68% of mobile apps will be powered by APIs. Even more worrisome, 1/3 of the top 20 companies in every industry will be disrupted over the next 3 years (IDC FutureScape 2015). Over 80% of enterprise IT organizations will commit to hybrid cloud architectures by 2017 (IDC).

So now that the concept of hybrid integration is understood, let’s jump into some ways to go beyond the powerful integration options that IBM Integration Bus provides.

IBM Integration Bus On Cloud

The IBM Integration Bus on Cloud solution offers integrations in a cloud environment. It uses the market-leading IBM Integration Bus run-time, therefore is compatible with IBM Integration Bus on premise (though not all IBM Integration Bus functions are supported in Integration Bus on Cloud, and this will be discussed in a future post).

This is a fully managed, IBM hosted service for the deployment, visibility and management of integrations that are built with IBM Integration Toolkit. So the development experience is currently identical to on premise, and Integration Bus on Cloud provides a web browser experience to upload and deploy that integration as well as all the management that goes with it – such as infrastructure, operations, etc.

It should be understood that for existing IBM Integration Bus users, IBM Integration Bus on Cloud offers many possibilities, which will be explained below, but also allows direct communication between an integration flow running on premise and on cloud. As mentioned, a future blog post will dive into the possibilities here. If you do not have a powerful and solid integration layer on premise today, IBM Integration Bus on Cloud is a compelling option.

Integration Bus On Cloud:

• Eliminates typical inhibitors to starting new projects such as CAPEX and hardware availability. And because it’s ready to go when you are, you can achieve faster time-to-value.
• Simplifies and automates many steps associated with creating the integration foundation for your business applications.
• Reduces complexity and frees up resource so you can focus on what really matters…your business.
• Scales to meet the demands of your business and the capacity-based pricing means you don’t need to run at 20% utilization for 90% of the year again.
• Is constantly updated with the latest and greatest capabilities which are tested by our experts so that risk of incompatibility is minimized.
• Provides continual security updates and secure connectivity to on premise data stores and applications.
• Provides the market leading Enterprise Application Integration solution as a service on IBM SoftLayer, IBM’s enterprise-grade, world class cloud infrastructure.

The latest capabilities of IBM Integration Bus on premise offers full integration with IBM Integration Bus on Cloud, offering true hybrid Integration Bus deployment. The idea of “callable flows” are supported, which means a flow running on IBM Integration Bus on premise directly invoking a flow running on IBM Integration Bus on Cloud, and vice versa from cloud to on premise. Note that this support also provides support for invocation between on premise IBM Integration Bus nodes, for distributed processing. By going through a secure connector, IBM Integration Bus on Cloud can simply invoke a callable flow on IBM Integration Bus on premise to provide secure and direct access to systems of record on premise, rather than trying to allow the cloud to try to access your on premise systems.

Part 2 of the article will cover IBM API Connect, IBM App Connect, and IBM Application Intgration Suite.