THE SILVESTRI GROUP

HYBRID INTEGRATION PLATFORM STRATEGY

The Future of Self Service Delivery

Thomas Silvestri

3/3/2016

THE SILVESTRI GROUP | Thomas Silvestri, Managing Partner | 3600 N Lake Shore Drive #2608, Chicago, IL. 60613 | thomas@thomassilvestri.com | www.thomassilvestri.com

Hybrid Integration Platforms

The Future of Self-Service Delivery

A key aspect of the Hybrid Integration Platforms (HIP) is that it has to support self-

service delivery of integration capabilities. Specialists, ad hoc and citizen integrators

should not depend on some central team when they need to use HIP features to

address their needs. If access to the HIP was a complex, tedious and bureaucratic

process that would take days or weeks to be completed, users would refuse the

organization HIP and look for more agile alternatives — such as stand-alone iPaaS or

iSaaS offerings.

To be accepted, an HIP should be as easy to deal with as these tools. Authorized users

should have self-service access to the organization's HIP capability via a user

experience tailored to their profile, whether integration specialist, ad hoc or citizen

integrator.

Integration Highlights

From an IT perspective, the benefit of the HIP lies in the ability to enable decentralized,

pervasive integration fulfillment, while maintaining some level of centralized control by

enforcing security, administration, monitoring and management.

Use Cases: Assess the degree to which your established integration infrastructure

can support your requirements (in terms of use cases, endpoints and fit-for-

constituent user experience) and identify functional and nonfunctional gaps.

Gaps: To fill these gaps, incrementally add iPaaS and iSaaS capabilities in the

context of an HIP that is operated, consumed and managed as a single integrated

entity.

Scale: Extend your established integration infrastructure with API management

capabilities to ensure that you can sufficiently secure, scale and govern API-based

integrations.

Profiles: Enable access to your HIP via a self-service integration portal that

selectively provides access to the HIP features and functions according to the user's

profile.

Security: Enforce centralized security, administration, monitoring and management

of integration specialists, ad hoc and citizen integrators by injecting these

capabilities into your HIP.

THE SILVESTRI GROUP | Thomas Silvestri, Managing Partner | 3600 N Lake Shore Drive #2608, Chicago, IL. 60613 | thomas@thomassilvestri.com | www.thomassilvestri.com

Select Integration Providers for Your HIP Tactically and With an Open Mind

In principle, an HIP should combine the functionality now provided by a variety of

distinct products and services — including, but not limited to: enterprise service buses,

data integration tools, B2B gateway software, managed file transfer, integration

appliances, iPaaS, iSaaS and API management.

Performance Highlights

As a cornerstone of the user hybrid integration platforms is custom-tailored design, UI, usability and total holistic platform experience to reduce the complexities and increase the user adoption and performance productivity execution on the platform:

Intuitiveness. Simple, easy-to-understand, layout and flow that follow consumer-design conventions. Atomic tasking design, in other words, bringing just enough automation with exactly the information and actions relevant to the task at hand. Consider how Apple justified not including an instruction manual with the iPad: “You already know how to use it.”

Interoperability. Tasks and business processes usually require transactions performed across many systems. User engagement looks to build solutions that systematically handle end-to-end integration, instead of forcing users to “alt-tab” among disparate applications on their desktops.

Aggregation. Related to interoperability, the ability to correlate and expose relationships among information sources (internal and external, structured and unstructured) allows users to expedite tasks and engage in higher-order reasoning about the business problem.

Portability. This requires creating an effective, controlled experience for employees to perform business tasks on their second and third screens (mobile devices, home PCs, and televisions).

Collaboration. Solutions should be proactively designed with the expectation that some collaboration will involve external resources (systems, information, and individuals).

THE SILVESTRI GROUP | Thomas Silvestri, Managing Partner | 3600 N Lake Shore Drive #2608, Chicago, IL. 60613 | thomas@thomassilvestri.com | www.thomassilvestri.com

Infrastructure and Operations Highlights

The attribute "hybrid" refers to the fact that an HIP can:

Brownfield and Greenfield IT Environments – agile, collaborative, and

performance driven

Target cloud, on-premises and "mixed" deployment models

Link any combination of cloud, on-premises, mobile and "thing" endpoints

Support the full spectrum of constituents (specialists, ad hoc and citizen

integrators) Address a wide range, and any combination, of use cases (B2B, application, data

and process integration)