Throughout the history of the IT industry, integration has been an important part of most projects. Integration of transactions, integration of data, or integration of processes have their own challenges and associated patterns and anti-patterns. In an age of mobile, social, and cloud, integration is more important than ever, but the scope of the challenge that is facing IT projects has changed. Partner application programming interfaces (APIs), social networks, physical sensors and devices, and many others are important sources of capability or insight. No longer is it sufficient to integrate resources under the control of the enterprise; many important resources live in the ecosystem beyond the enterprise boundaries. This IBM® Redbooks® Solution Guide focuses on using IBM products together as a "hybrid" integration solution to achieve total company integration.

Today’s customers expect you to be relevant to their life. Relevancy is not generic; it is specific to the customer in the moment. To remain relevant, enterprises must expand and engage with the customer and with third parties (developers) to support the customer. It is time for innovative solutions (see Figure 1).

Application programming interface (API) management delivers the business centricity and business model that many service-oriented architecture (SOA) initiatives historically have lacked, and SOA delivers the experience and engineering discipline that drives good API design and provides robust integration to systems of record. API management and classical SOA governance are highly synergistic. API management refocuses on the business aspects of human and software interactions. The advent of APIs allows you to separate the business concerns of making an API a successful product from the IT concerns of providing the service that implements the API. The journey from IT-centric web services to business-centric API management is necessary for enterprises that build systems of interaction spanning beyond their enterprise walls. API management solutions provide can define an API and project that API into an ecosystem that the enterprise cannot effectively reach through its own user solutions.


Figure 1. Opportunities for businesses to innovate


Did you know?

Mobile users are intrinsically impatient and always on the move; in fact, the average mobile user spends around 60 seconds in a mobile app before moving to something else. This means that mobile interactions must be personal to be relevant. They must be in the here and now. The modern user expects you to know who they are and what they need now. These characteristics represent an opportunity for enterprises that understand how to embrace them and provide a differentiating customer experience.


Business value

What is called the Nexus of Forces (http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/nexus-of-forces/) by Gartner is the confluence of mobile, social, cloud, and big data analytics. The Nexus of Forces implies an experience where context is key and important interactions might not be directly related to business transactions but rather focused on building social relationships and ecosystems. Social interactions of interest to the business can and will happen between two third parties (such as viral content).

Many interactions are mobile and happen in a real-time context. You can access information, accounts, or contact a friend dynamically. The growth of social media created a consumer who expects their opinion to matter and chooses the mobile device as the way the consumer interacts with the world. These characteristics change the scope of what is considered business relevant.

For businesses that are ready to grow beyond the enterprise, the Nexus of Forces raises some key questions and challenges around defining a business model and engineering the business solutions that support it: