Integration is the process of making different apps and systems work together. Through collaborating on workflows, allowing them to share data, and coordinating how employees work across apps, they can achieve these goals. Initially, this meant connecting on-premises software to another. TIBCO, BEA Software, and WebMethods went public in 1999-2001, validating the first integration market. In part, this explosion of integration tools was fueled by the increasing use of core enterprise software, such as ERP, HR, and CRM, that businesses were implementing.
However, the landscape has changed so much since then. As a result of SaaS, purchasing, using, and maintaining business apps has become easier and more convenient. In this way, software has evolved from a tool to a key differentiator in every business. SaaS/Cloud and Mobile applications are being adopted by all enterprises and businesses at an accelerated rate. An average enterprise today uses 1,427 cloud apps across its entire organization. Compared to 1999 and 2000, when an average enterprise used five to ten enterprise apps, this is a stark contrast.
A decade later, "Digital Transformation" is now considered a top priority by many companies, fueling a second wave of integration. Digital Transformation revolves around implementing best-of-breed apps and systems and enabling smart, fast, and flexible integrations and automations across all a company’s apps, APIs, data, people and devices to deliver innovative, personalized, multi-channel experiences.
TIBCO, the company we know today, was the first to develop an "Information Bus" in the 1980s. During this era, everything revolved around big, monolithic pieces of software. The software was standalone and could not be interacted with. When TIBCO was introduced, there was no way for software to talk to each other, but this "Bus" made it possible to share data between applications.
Early integration products provided a lot of value, but the business world was very different back then. It was primarily a few large suites of apps - such as Oracle and SAP - which were expensive, complex, and highly technical. IT had to implement them on premise, which only Global 1000 companies could afford. In today's world, companies no longer must use monolithic applications. Instead, they can choose from hundreds of options on offer the most powerful, innovative, and modern apps that fit their needs. The size of a company no longer matters. The startup costs of a new cloud application are low, so they can implement the software within days.
Integration platforms have drastically changed the way businesses work from when they were created. Business apps have become consumerized, mobile-centric, self-service, and low cost, but the Integration tools to connect these apps, often remain complex, technical and, at times, more expensive than the apps they are integrating.
It should be easy enough for even non-developers to create integrations. As lines of business adopt SaaS, it is imperative that they are able to build their own integrations and workflows without concern.
Customers Support / Marketing / Sales Ops can integrate applications and automate workflows without having to handle underlying technology, such as security, scalability, error handling, duplication of records, undoing errors easily, and more. Integrations should still be managed and governed by IT in a company, but not necessarily built by IT itself.
Integration tools should be flexible, allowing future changes to be made when necessary. Integrating systems used to be a built-to-last process. After your Order-to-cash process is in place between SAP and Salesforce, you don't have to change it very often - the requirements were more stable and, besides, the consultants who performed these integrations have moved on. The situation has changed. The processes and workflows around business apps are constantly changing as new apps are added and existing apps are updated. We live in a changing world.
The integration platform must be easy to use, agile and flexible so that anyone, from business analysts to app administrators, can roll out new integrations quickly without relying on IT.
During the early days of integration, most integrations were performed between a few functional app suites. Integration tools are typically optimized for a small number of heavy-duty integrations between such suites. Today, companies use more than a thousand apps that must work together.
A marketing team, for instance, will use a variety of marketing automation apps, including HubSpot as well as MailChimp, EventMobi, Slack, etc. The platform must support all of these apps in order to integrate and automate your marketing workflows.
Traditionally, integration platforms have strong features, but their power is limited by the apps that they support, the use cases they allow, and the types of users they can support. Due to these limitations, business users are unable to build integrations to support their line of business, which makes it impossible for them to build integrations. Making it impossible to offer the embedded integration experiences your customers want. Or making it impossible for your organization to build the digital products it needs to thrive.
The integration challenges of today require more than middleware - organizations need an integration platform that scales in the future.