Integration drives your business in a hybrid, AI driven world

With integration critical to every business, does it ever stop? Of course not. And integrations run everywhere your business runs. So, if you have multiple clusters of Red Hat OpenShift, your business runs in all those clusters and your integrations run in all those clusters. These could be on-premises, in any cloud, or in any hybrid combination.

And now let’s consider the challenge. You need to apply some updates. Maybe a security patch for API Connect. Or you need to add more resources to an App Connect flow. As an administrator this might mean logging separately into each cluster, co-ordinating with local teams who manage each cluster, and gaining consents. Time, effort, delay, risk. Not what you need.

What you do need is to handle it all seamlessly and instantly from a single UI. Direct updates and ensured compliance without complaint. That’s what you have with IBM Cloud Pak for Integration (CP4I) 16.1.3, announced today December 9^th 2025, and available from December 17^th 2025. Let’s explore more about how the latest enhancements in Cloud Pak for Integration build on the flexible, secure and scalable container-native integration platform that drives your business agility, wherever you are running your business.

Remember, as I have mentioned in past blogs, integration isn’t just about connecting or moving data. For your business it is about how you can thrive in a hybrid, AI-driven world. Cloud Pak for Integration 16.1.3 takes this even further with updates to Unified Management, improved compliance to security and accessibility needs through Federal Compliance and provides access to a tech preview of AI Agents to help you do more, even as your business becomes more demanding.

Directly see and update integration status across clusters with Unified Management.

Building on the initial release of Unified Management in CP4I 16.1.2, which allowed you to see the status of integrations across multiple Red Hat OpenShift clusters from a single Platform UI screen, this latest update allows you to directly update those remote integrations, right from your single UI window.

Previously if you wanted to make an update you would need to have a separate window and Platform UI logged into that remote cluster to allow you to make the update. Effective, but it took you out of your screen, and your overall view. Now it’s more seamless. Direct. You want to make a change to where that App Connect Integration is deployed? Or update Event Streams to the latest release? Do it directly, inside your UI window, never losing your visibility elsewhere. By taking fewer of your admin cycles to do an update, you can not only save time but become more productive and get more of those essential tasks done. And with more clusters, and more deployed integrations, the greater your potential savings.

Whether you are using Unified Management to span clusters across different locations, or clusters both on-premises and in multiple clouds, or even spanning Dev, Test and Prod you can now view and manage your integrations together, unified.

Compliance, not compromise with new enhancements supporting US Federal standards

For organizations in regulated sectors such as US Federal agencies, or those who do business with them, failing to comply with US Federal standards is not an option. The good news now is that CP4I 16.1.3 delivers multiple updates which help to meet these standards. The Platform UI is enhanced to support the following:

·      FIPS and FISMA compliance. Now meets Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 140-3, and also Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA) requirements for encryption, security controls, and risk management.

·      Audit and Accessibility Enhancements. Improved logging and changes to the UI to align with federal accessibility standards (Section 508). Accessibility changes ensure that users in any industry can benefit from consistent access in tooling. Enhancements to audit capabilities improve logging granularity, and provide more reporting of audit required data, needed in any industry.

·      IPv6 support and Secure Software Development Framework (SSDF) compliance. As use of IPv6 increases, alongside continuing use of IPv4, CP4I can now support dual-stack IPv6, where it is deployed alongside IPv4. CP4I has always been built on secure coding practices and now SSDF compliance is demonstration of that long-term commitment to minimizing security risks.

As well as the updates to the CP4I Platform UI, the individual integration products have also been making enhancements to boost their compliance with Federal Standards as well.

Container native integrations on Red Hat OpenShift and AKS.

Cloud Pak for Integration is built as a modern container-native integration platform to allow your business to benefit from secure, scalable, resilient and highly available integration capabilities. While a recent release added Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) as an optional deployment platform for the Platform UI, IBM continues to recommend Red Hat OpenShift as the Kubernetes environment of choice for multi-cloud or hybrid integration deployments.

Cloud Pak for Integration always aims to add support for new releases of OpenShift within 30 days of the release of the new OpenShift release, and any in-support release of OpenShift is supported by any supported release of Cloud Pak for Integration. Cloud Pak for Integration 16.1.3 therefore supports OpenShift 4.20, which is based on Kubernetes 1.33. One of the features in this Kubernetes version, available in beta and without the need for a feature-gate is ‘in-place pod vertical scaling’.

This Kubernetes feature is likely to be of interest, particularly for customers using App Connect Enterprise in deployments of Cloud Pak for Integration on OpenShift. With this feature, pods can be allocated a higher cpu-limit amount for start-up and then have the cpu-limit reduced before the pod is marked as ready-for-work. For customers with large numbers of App Connect pods, this ensures that pod restarts are faster, without negative impact of higher licensing costs. Read more about it in this blog entry by Rob Convery.

Get smarter assistance with new AI Agents to help troubleshoot and health-check CP4I.

You might have read the previous exciting update about new AI Agents being available in tech preview for use with Cloud Pak for Integration. This tech preview was previously only available for use with Cloud Pak for Integration 16.1.0 and is due to end on December 31^st 2025, but with the new 16.1.3 release these agents are also available with this release until the new tech preview ends in March 2026. We would love for you to try out these Agents and see how they can help understand more of what is going on in Cloud Pak for Integration, simply by asking questions to the Agents. During the tech preview, use of the Agents is free, with tokens provided for use with watsonx.ai SaaS. Sign up for the trial here: http://ibm.biz/cp4i-agent-preview

Learn more, and take your next steps

Hopefully this release demonstrates the ongoing innovation that our excellent team is achieving to help your integrations drive your business. There is a great webinar covering Cloud Pak for Integration, as well as IBM API Connect, and IBM Event Automation happening on December 10^th – you can sign up here to attend live or listen to the replay afterwards.

And don’t forget you can always request a Live Demo of Cloud Pak for Integration here