Many people think of IBM Integration Bus as an old, no longer needed tool in today’s world of REST, APIs, and microservices. Further, most organizations currently separate internal and external integration, for B2B/EDI or HIPAA for example, using separate integration tools or at least view these as separate needs. Both of these are not true today.
Powerfully simple integration to the data locked up in systems of record, not only the latest microservices based solutions and data exposed as APIs, but your legacy systems locked up in TCP/IP sockets, IMS, CICS, on iSeries, etc., is needed to provide a complete integration capability for your architecture enabling you to then quickly expose that data to new systems of engagement, via APIs or other protocols. Creating a single solution, highly capable of handling all internal integration as well as all external integration, is very doable with IBM, making use of three products: IBM Integration Bus, IBM Transformation Extender Advanced, and IBM DataPower Gateway.
This IBM solution is based around the industry’s leader in the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) space, IBM Integration Bus. IBM Integration Bus has been in the market for over 17 years. In that time, it has grown from a basic integration tool to its true leadership position with support for a very large set of diverse protocols, including many legacy formats such as IBM MQ, CORBA, and integration with CICS and IMS, as well as keeping up to date with all of the latest protocols, such as SOAP web services, RESTful services using JSON, APIs, mobile integration, JMS 2.0, and more. This maturity of the product is a tremendous strength of the product.
IBM Integration Bus V10.0 delivers a comprehensive integration solution. In addition to connecting a wide range of applications, services, and systems across heterogeneous IT environments, it provides the visibility and control capabilities that are needed to support critical business activities, such as monitoring, auditing, process management, and analytics. Integration Bus provides the capabilities that are needed to build solutions to address diverse integration requirements. A rich set of connectors provide broad connectivity to a wide range of data sources, which include packaged applications, files, mobile devices, messaging systems, and databases. A wide variety of data formats are supported that include standards-based formats (such as XML, DFDL, and JSON), industry formats (such as ISO8583), and custom formats.
A comprehensive range of operations can be performed on data, which include routing, filtering, enrichment, publish-subscribe, sequencing, and aggregation. These flexible integration capabilities can support your choice of solution architectures, including service-oriented, RESTful, event-oriented, data-driven, and file-based (batch or real-time).
IBM Integration Bus is a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for On-Premises Application Integration Suites. And because IBM Integration Bus is not tied to an application server, it provides the ideal integration solution for all business environments no matter the chosen application environment, unlocking the business potential within your IT architecture by providing rapid access to applications and data from all parts of your business whenever and wherever it is needed
Robust and scalable with market leading performance and scalability, IBM Integration Bus is also fast and easy to install, delivering numerous out-of-the-box capabilities that are ready to deploy and use, helping you to begin realizing increased business value from day one. There are thousands of Integration Bus production installations worldwide, across all industries. It has the strongest ecosystem, with more than 1000 Business Partners and Global Users groups, and it leads the way in open standards adoption and support.
IBM Integration Bus can be configured to map identities between source and target applications without compromising your enterprise-wide security model, helping you secure the data flow as it crosses organizational boundaries and various security domains.
Combined with a fully featured development studio, excellent documentation, ease of deployment, and integrated management, IBM Integration Bus’s user-centric design is superior to its Open Source ESB competitors. The free development studio has a built-in test environment to quickly and easily test developed assets immediately. There is also a Test Data Capture facility for unit test and regression testing. It includes the ability to import, view, and edit test data, and inject messages over various transports. It can capture mock inputs for later replay.
IBM Integration Bus has many advanced features, including access to a full range of industry standard databases and ERP systems, built-in business rules, built-in coherent caching technology, and a very powerful graphical mapper. There are many advanced graphically driven development tools to enable quick and simple development, such as for creating content based routing capabilities.
The development studio Includes a whole set of pre-built patterns, which are reusable solutions that encapsulate a best practice approach to solving a common architecture, design, or deployment task in a particular context. They can be quickly configured and deployed, and also extended to create new patterns.
IBM Integration Bus includes a business transaction monitor for tracking business transactions, with Web UI views to define contributing flows and event chronology, a runtime data recorder component, and visualisation of status. It reports on the lifecycle of a message payload through an end-to-end enterprise transaction.
IBM Integration Bus has management function through its Developer Toolkit as well as through a web console. Inside the Toolkit, one can create or manage Integration Nodes, which are essentially a set of execution processes that host message flows remote or locally. The Integration Nodes provide a degree of isolation between flows to ensure they run as unique processes. IBM Integration Bus’s web user interface also allows for flow management; this console allows for starting and stopping of flows, as well as reviewing and changing flow parameters. The console also shows performance statistics at a component level, revealing bottlenecks for the purpose of optimizing overall throughput. Management is also available via command line/scripting, a Java API, and a REST API.
Documentation and forums are important as they are the main sources of information for a developer. Without an active community, developers are left with unanswered questions and the need to go down support channels, which takes significantly more time. IBM is in the best position here.
IBM Transformation Extender Advanced is literally a plug-in that extends IBM Integration Bus with full EDI processing capabilities. It provides a modular infrastructure for highly available, scalable transformation and document processing. It provides automated sequencing of document processing functions, such as enveloping and de-enveloping, thorough transformation and metadata support, and data for reporting, error handling, and analytics. It offers an exclusive AutoEnvelope function that creates trading partner envelopes based on a sample message, and REST API access to all functions, which simplifies cloud deployment of IBM Transformation Extender Advanced. It is built to address key requirements in supply chain management, including support for X12, EDIFACT, and TRADACOMS standards. There is also support for HIPAA EDI, which includes full HIPAA validation through level 7, making this combination IBMs most powerful HIPAA processing solution. IBM Transformation Extender Advanced also includes a web based console for trading partner management, and supports multi-tenancy.
Since this functionality runs as part of IBM Integration Bus, it benefits from the performance, scalability, high availability, and all of the advanced development functions available in IBM Integration Bus. This means a single development tool for the development of any integration requirement, handling external and internal integration with one tool, and also a single way to administer the solution. It is not two separate tools cobbled together, but literally a single tool, IBM Integration Bus, extended with a library that adds the intelligent handling of B2B functions.
Last, the solution gets completed with the addition of the world’s leading gateway solution, the IBM DataPower Gateway. Using virtual or physical appliances, DataPower provides a single gateway that secures all of your B2B, SOA/web services, mobile, API, and cloud traffic.
Organizations need a single solution for a security and integration gateway that is capable of handling all types of application workloads with a policy-driven interface. A gateway with these characteristics can offer these benefits:
- Consistent security, control, and integration policy enforcement
- End-to-end security for transactional workloads, regardless of the business channel from which they come
- Reduced infrastructure complexity
- Lower operating costs
- Improved user experience
- Easier to scale back-end IT infrastructure
Deploying a security and integration gateway, enterprises can decouple the enforcement of security and other policies from the underlying application. It should also deliver functional offload of repeatable tasks, enabling the back-end applications and resources to more efficiently scale to meet the high-volume demands that inevitably occur with API and cloud traffic.
Altogether, this is an extremely powerful yet quick and simple solution to implement. It builds on the very best integration solutions in the market, including the most powerful and high performing Enterprise Service Bus, the best EDI mapping technology with powerfully simple B2B document processing, and a highly secure edge of network gateway. It offers universal connectivity, with powerful development tooling to build solutions quick.