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Integration 101: How to solve the biggest unsolved challenge of IT Only with a flexible integration layer built on the principles of API-led connectivity and reuse will today’s businesses be primed to become the digital innovation factories that tomorrow demands of them. BY IAN FAIRCLOUGH, VICE-PRESIDENT OF SERVICES, OFFICE OF THE CTO, EMEA, MULESOFT IN TODAY’S CONNECTED ECONOMY, software rules the world. Market leadership is increasingly driven by the speed at which organisations can digitally transform to deliver new applications and enhanced experiences for their customers. This trend has been amplified by the COVID-19 crisis and will continue to gather momentum in the years to come. Indeed, IDC predicts within five years, nearly two-thirds of global enterprises will have become digital innovation factories, deploying new application code on a daily basis. However, as the demand for new
software experiences increases, IT departments are struggling to keep up. The Connectivity Benchmark Report 2020 highlighted that 85 percent of global organisations have significant integration challenges, which are stalling their digital innovation drive. Of the almost 900 different applications in use across the average enterprise, just over a quarter are integrated, leaving data trapped in silos. This makes it harder to create connected customer experiences and collaborate with external partners effectively. What’s more, just two-in-five global enterprises completed all of last year’s digital transformation projects in light of the challenges they faced. Clearly the status quo is unsustainable. Traditional IT operating models are broken, and organisations must find new ways of working to accelerate project delivery.
IT’s biggest unsolved challenge
Integration has been one of the biggest headaches for IT departments since before most of us can remember. The problem goes back to the way organisations connected applications and databases before modern integration platforms existed. The most widely used approach was to create point-to-point custom code, which was embedded directly into the application or database that needed to be connected. This effectively built a bridge between two systems, enabling data to cross from one to the other so information could flow freely across the organisation to deliver digital services. However, while this worked to a reasonable extent during the early days when IT systems were less
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ISSUE VI 2021
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