Your business is constantly changing. Updating. Evolving. What was new yesterday is now the critical foundation of today’s core architecture. Your requirements for what you need from integration may remain the same, but the way in which you might want to deploy, use, or manage integrations may change. Each part of your business, or any specific projects may require a different integration capability or feature, but many of the integration capabilities and drivers for integration will remain constant.

Most businesses will have a critical invoice and payments system, which will have been in place for many years and will be an essential part of the business with connectivity and integrations to almost every other part of the business. And now consider a new business opportunity that needs to start-up, deploy and get into production rapidly. New applications need to be put in place, and there needs to be connectivity and integration into the invoice system.  The application owners choose to deploy their new applications on AWS and need to integrate to the existing invoice system.

Cloud Pak for Integration is widely used for integrating many of the business systems, with the customer using integration components like IBM MQ, IBM App Connect and IBM API Connect as needed by the business requirements. Some deployments are in VMs but a growing number of instances run in Red Hat OpenShift as the customer moves to container-based deployments with automated GitOps helping to streamline operations.

Given the short timeframe needed by the new application team to be up and running, the new project, and the uncertain level of workload expected in this new opportunity they are keen to take advantage of the new IBM webMethods Hybrid Integration SaaS offering. This will provide a hosted and managed integration platform in AWS, and includes both API Connect and App Connect SaaS as components within the platform, meaning they can build out integrations using technologies they are already familiar with, but with the integration runtimes deployed and managed by IBM and available almost instantly as needed. With the workload expected to be variable, including low numbers initially, the usage-based pricing makes great sense, and the company doesn’t need to allocate any additional resources to manage the deployment or to plan for scaling.  

In our customer example, given their existing skills with App Connect and API Connect, the customer rapidly builds out new integrations and uses APIs to provide access to the necessary data, and the new business opportunity is successful. Additional capacity is added to IBM Cloud Pak for Integration to support the integrations running there, and a new B2B project to work with a new supplier is considered as an addition to the IBM webMethods Hybrid Integration deployment.

Many other customers are likely to have similar needs, where IBM webMethods Hybrid Integration SaaS offers a valuable new deployment option to extend their integration deployment choices. Where customers already have IBM Cloud Pak for Integration, either deployed on Red Hat OpenShift, or with the individual integration programs deployed standalone in VMs, they can continue to take advantage of these self-managed integration deployments, and grow to support new projects. Also they can add a managed integration SaaS solution that includes some of the same integration technologies, with usage-based licensing adding further flexibility for these cloud-based integrations.  

Customers with Cloud Pak for Integration have a complete software integration platform for self-managed deployments with a wide set of integration capabilities either on-premises or in any cloud, and with additional technical enhancements to extend the value of the integrations, and also packaging and licensing benefits.

Cloud Pak for Integration includes the following integration capabilities

• IBM MQ and IBM MQ Advanced
• IBM App Connect
• IBM API Connect
• IBM DataPower Gateway Virtual Edition
• IBM Event Streams
• IBM Event Endpoint Management
• IBM Aspera High Speed Transfer Server

Any of these capabilities can be deployed under the Cloud Pak for Integration entitlement and also can be deployed either as containers or in VMs (with the exception of Event Streams and Event Endpoint Management which are container only).

Numerous technical enhancements are part of Cloud Pak for Integration which deliver additional features over and above the integration components

• Single screen view and manage integration instances with Platform UI and Unified Management
• Find, create and reuse integrations with the Asset Repository
• Set policies and required features and enforce deployments with Approved Assets
• Build and deploy and manage complete end-to-end integrations with Integration Assemblies and Canvas
• Simplify and accelerate version to version migrations with the Upgrade Readiness Planner
• AI-powered conversational guidance with the Integration Assistant
• Powerful rapid integration deployments with Declarative Deployment
• Simple, scalable, secure and resilient workloads with container optimized operator deployment

Some of the packaging and licensing enhancements for Cloud Pak for Integration include:

• Licensing based on VPCs/core-capacity based on concurrent deployed containers
• 3 cores of Red Hat OpenShift entitlement for every 1 Cloud Pak for Integration VPC
• Non-production deployments at 50% of the cost
• Deploy any or all components as needed up to your total entitlement and change at any time
• IBM Storage Fusion Essentials included with 12TB per cluster available

Customers looking for a SaaS integration platform can now take advantage of IBM webMethods Hybrid Integration SaaS which includes the following SaaS hosted and managed capabilities

• Application Integration supporting both IBM App Connect Enterprise and IBM webMethods Integration
• API Management supporting both IBM API Connect and IBM webMethods API Management
• IBM webMethods B2B
• IBM Sterling B2B Value Added Network (VAN)
• IBM webMethods MFT
• IBM Event Endpoint Management
• View, deploy, manage and monitor integrations with IBM webMethods Hybrid Integration Hybrid Control Plane

Any or all of these capabilities can be used simply by buying Resource Units of IBM webMethods Hybrid Integration SaaS and the resource units are consumed according to the usage of each component. Different bands of consumption are available, with higher usage of any component leading to a lower per transaction/call rate at the higher bands. With the components and runtime being hosted and managed, there are no additional hardware or operational costs, and upgrades and migrations are also taken care of by IBM resources.

The combination of being able to use IBM integration capabilities either as a cloud-hosted and managed integration platform as IBM webMethods Hybrid Integration SaaS or a container-native customer managed integration platform, enhanced with additional technical features as IBM Cloud Pak for Integration, means that any business need that can be addressed through integration can be solved with IBM integration solutions. IBM Cloud Pak for Integration, and IBM webMethods Hybrid Integration SaaS together power your future integration needs.

Learn more about IBM Cloud Pak for Integration here, including requesting a live demo. Or watch a webinar covering the latest enhancements to the Cloud Pak here.

And for IBM webMethods Hybrid Integration SaaS learn more here, and you can also request a live demo.