Cloud Pak for Integration

Announcing on March 23 and available on March 26, 2021, the latest release of Cloud Pak for Integration delivers not only new and enhance capabilities but builds on IBM’s Automation Foundation to offer new ways to solve business problems to achieve faster and better outcomes.

Integration is critical

Integration is critical in addressing every aspect of IT business infrastructure. Creating a solution to address a new business opportunity? You need integration to ensure it works with the other parts of the business. Looking to connect different parts of the business together to add new value? You need integration. Looking to improve your existing business functions to be faster, and more efficient? You need integration. The list continues.

What also continues are the improvements being made in each new release of IBM Cloud Pak for Integration.

Adding the Automation Foundation

The 2021.1.1 release includes the Automation Foundation. This means that businesses can now choose to take advantage of Robotic Process Automation, allowing them to integrate with applications in new ways that would have been complex, expensive and time-consuming to do previously.

Also part of the Automation Foundation, process mining can be used to review how existing integrations are performing and suggest improvements to the flow and design of integrations.

Kafka, APIs and more

There are also capabilities enhanced in this release that deliver exciting additional benefits to customers. One of these allows businesses to exploit the growing amount of valuable data that might be distributed by Kafka brokers. Many organizations see the benefit of using Kafka for distributed data reflecting business events and other data updates. This data is held in stream histories.

In this new release of IBM Cloud Pak for Integration, a new multi-form API management feature allows these Kafka data stores to be accessed through a new Asynchronous API. This extension to the API Management capability in IBM Cloud Pak for Integration will allow businesses to make far more use of data moved using Kafka by making it much faster and easier to access it for valuable business needs.

The API management capabilities are also further enhanced through additional automated API test generation, based on analysis of OpenAPI usage. The creation of these additional test cases will enable better test coverage and help businesses make more productive use of new APIs.

Messaging enhancements

For businesses that use IBM MQ and are planning to deploy in containers on Red Hat OpenShift, there is the initial availability to try out a new approach for High Availability designed for container deployments of MQ. This new MQ Native HA feature, which is currently unsupported and available only for evaluation purposes, enables MQ to replicate persistent messages and log data to other passive MQ Queue Manager instances running in other containers using only MQ, and not relying on external storage replication or network storage locking.

There are further enhancements also that enable IBM Cloud Pak for Integration to be deployed isolated in a separate Kubernetes namespace. Additional storage options, available in the included Storage Suite for Cloud Paks are now included in the list of supported options in the Knowledge Center. And even more Smart Connectors are now included for additional connectivity to 3^rd party and IBM systems and applications.

New add-ons

Finally, there are new additions to the set of add-ons available to IBM Cloud Pak for Integration. This list previously already included Cloud Pak for Integration Operation Dashboard add-on and the Confluent Platform add-on for Cloud Pak for Integration. In this release there is the option to purchase IBM Aspera Enterprise add-on delivering the High Speed Transfer Service running at 10Gbps, but also other tools and capabilities enhancing the Aspera function.

And there is a new Cloud Pak for Integration API Calls add-on. This allows businesses to deploy out API Management capabilities, but they will purchase based on the number of API Calls rather than the number of processor cores used in the deployment. This can provide an option for more cost-effective deployment.

Next steps

To learn more about these enhancements to IBM Cloud Pak for Integration, join our webinar, “Automate your integration - What’s new in Cloud Pak for Integration 2021.1.1” on April 15^th. You can also read more in our announcement letter. You can also reach out to me directly if you’d like to talk more.

Link for webinar registration: IBM.biz/IntegrationTuesdays