INTELLIGENT SOFTWARE BUSINESS
year, and 29% indicated they were already
implementing or using them. The figures
were even higher for containers: 38% in
planning, 33% implementing.
Operation integration
As organisations seek to modernise their
application environments, a crucial
consideration is being able to bridge
old and new technologies in a safe and
meaningful way. That is, successfully
maintaining existing applications while
harnessing the benefits of new agile
architectures and tools.
What IT bosses may not be thinking
about is that much of the answer to the
integration question lies in middleware. It
is the tech you do not see, working to solve
diverse and complex problems behind the
scenes in systems like holiday bookings,
electronic ticketing and payment card
fraud detection.
Middleware technologies can integrate
these systems and share the data that is
spread across multiple applications and
processes. They also empower users with
automated business processes and rules
that help an organisation respond rapidly
to changing conditions. By tidying up the
back end, as well as providing a platform
to build applications on, middleware can
help accelerate the delivery of new services
to employees and customers.
And it enables the organisation
to do this agnostic of environment and
device, providing the flexibility to
deploy applications on premise, in the
cloud or a combination of both, and
spanning the range of devices critical to
today’s organisations.
For delivery specialist Hermes,
middleware is a means to better track
delivery information for customers – a
two-hour process of manually batching
data and pushing out into customer-facing
web applications has been automated and
now takes 60 seconds.
For Telegraph Media Group, a
middleware-powered platform has
simplified the launch of compelling new
digital content to audiences on desktop,
tablet and smartphone devices. And
for King’s College Hospital, the NHS
Foundation Trust brought in a new
integration platform to enable more than
50 hospital systems to exchange critical
patient information quickly and reliably.
About data
The API economy is helping democratise
access to data and services, presenting a
great opportunity to better connect people
and enterprises. When CIOs are looking
at becoming a connected enterprise, they
should be starting to think about data as a
first-class citizen. Many organisations are
sitting on treasure troves of information, if
they can only process and contextualise it
across a variety of platforms.
No longer suffering from a lack of data,
the challenge for businesses is a lack of
the right data at the right time; they are
dealing with spiralling bits and bytes
generated from multiple sources such as
social media and connected devices.
As such, those responsible for IT or
applications should start treating data
less like a static warehouse and more
as a dynamic data fabric. Traditional
integration approaches involve the cost
and complexity associated with data
warehouses or data pipeline techniques -
extract, transform, load.
However, with a data fabric,
organisations get just-in-time processing
capabilities that can bring together
data from multiple sources, easily
accommodate new sources and move
away from traditional silos. Again, they
can look to use middleware technologies
to do this, in the shape of data
virtualisation technologies.
Data virtualisation can be used to
implement a data access layer, which
gathers together the underlying data and
prepares it for analytics tools. This is a
technique that offers accurate, reliable
data in real time with no unnecessary data
replication, reducing the cost of out-of-
sync reports.
In this way, organisations can achieve
greater productivity and efficiency,
unlocking data from silos into unified
information at the speed of business.
A great example of a business taking
advantage of its wealth of data is the Royal
Bank of Scotland, which implemented
a data access layer to support real-
time data decisions. Many financial
services organisations are faced with
needing to capture more sophisticated
information from different systems such as
transactional, risk, ledger and static, and
be able to deliver it over the right channel
in the right way.
As an outcome, business intelligence
teams with the right tools can mine this
data and gain insights that can add great
value to the business and the experience
delivered to customers. The way I see
it, integration middleware is the key
for a modern architecture, and the
organisations that recognise its strategic
value can gain a head-start on the road
to digitalisation.
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