If you have not tried IBM App Connect, you really should spend a few minutes to check it out. It is one of those things you really need to see to understand just how powerfully simple this tool can be for you or for those in your organization that need to do some integration but lack the IT skill. With IBM App Connect, you can connect applications in minutes, whether they are on the cloud or a private network, and with no coding required.
IBM App Connect is a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution that provides the App Connect Designer web application for simple, guided app-to-app connections that business users can easily create for themselves in a few minutes. App Connect excels at allowing you to connect SaaS/on cloud solutions together, or connect a SaaS application with an on-premise application. Currently there are two primary types of integration solutions, referred to as flows, that can be built with App Connect.
You can build event-driven flows. This type of flow will connect applications, either SaaS/on cloud like Salesforce, Marketo, and SAP, so that when an event occurs in one application, the other connected apps are updated automatically. These are referred to as event-driven flows.
You can also build flows for an API. You can create flows for an API so that when the request is submitted (such as through a mobile or web application), the flow performs all its actions, and then returns a response that either confirms that the actions were successful, or returns the data that was requested.
Your IT department can also expose in-house applications, such as IBM Integration Bus message flows, as custom applications in App Connect Designer, with the same look-and-feel, and ease of use, as other applications. The App Connect developer does not need to know any details about the application, just how to make use of the data.
The App Connect Designer runs on the IBM Cloud. The Designer is used to build your flows. The whole goal of App Connect is to make this easy – easy to connect to applications via included connectors, and easy to build and run your flows. We have put a lot of intelligence into the connectors and the flows, so you do not have to worry about error handling and dealing with things like connection problems. Our connectors know the application it connects to, understands their APIs, their security, their data structures, etc. This makes it very easy to connect and integrate to the application. There are over 50 connectors today, though this number is growing rapidly to a much larger number. This includes some generic connectors, like a HTTP connector that can be used to connect to applications over HTTP/REST where there is not a custom connector available yet.
The Designer allows you to easily select the endpoints, what data or objects you need to interact with, and build the flow that integrates the endpoints. You can easily add mapping between the different objects, handling looping, and perform IF-THEN logic.
The Designer includes a large and growing set of templates, which can be used to build common integrations between various systems, or to get examples of what you can do and how you can do it.
The App Connect Designer also has a dashboard, to provide visibility to all of your flows, see their status, and to control them (stop/start, etc.), as well as view errors or when necessary turn on debug logging
App Connect also offers notifications, which enable you to monitor events, receive notifications, and take action when each one occurs. This feature allows you to create notification cards in your flows, that will provide a notification, received as a push notification on your desktop and which are also displayed in the Notification tab of the App Connect user interface for future reference. A notification card can also contain automated actions for you to trigger, such as sending an email to your team, or creating a task in another application.
Last, for your API flows, there is built in API management features to allow you to do basic security, exposing the API to a portal for very simple testing of the API, and basic rate limiting. This is a very quick and simple way to expose, test, and control your API. Even basic analytics about your API are provided. For full control and security, you can easily import the API into IBM API Connect, providing the full capabilities of it to secure, control, and expose your API.
So, you truly can build very powerful, yet quick and easy integration flows to integrate your SaaS applications, without the need for IT to build it for you. Check out the ease and power for yourself. It is really fun! A free trial is available. App Connect Professional is available as a multi-tenant platform that runs in the IBM Cloud, https://appconnect.ibmcloud.com/professional/.