Integration needs escalate as enterprises ramp up ESBs, seek to join SaaS and legacy
"Enterprises are seeking a lean, mean, and more holistic approach to integration, doing more real-time integration and planning increased use of enterprise service buses (ESBs) and data services platforms," notes Vollmer.
Enterprises are seeking a lean, mean, and more holistic approach to integration.
In the survey, 58 percent of respondents have adopted ESBs, and another 32 percent are considering adoption. What else will drive integration? The need to integrate on-premises apps with software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps is affecting requirements—31 percent of respondents are planning to adopt SaaS within one year or more, said Vollmer.
The challenge, then, is not just middleware integrations amid a more complex and dynamic environment, but of integrating more types of services and resources from more places by more people. The bottleneck of IT-administered integrations based on installed integration platforms does not seem up to this task. The integration requirements need to shift right along with the elements that support "boundaryless" processes.
Reacting to these trends, Workday recently delivered a set of cloud-based integration capabilities to its partner ecosystem and growing stable of SaaS ERP users. [Disclosure: Workday is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]
Early advocacy of iPaaS
An early advocate for the "integration as a service" concept, Workday is delivering on that vision in a way that could rapidly broaden its appeal beyond human resources management (HRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) and into more general cloud services. The strong integration capabilities bolsters the appeal of Workday's applications services, draws in more service partners, and sets the stage for providing wider integration capabilities.
While business-to-business integration is a key requirement for how companies support their employees -- with complex interactions across suppliers for payroll, benefits, and recruitment -- the data and access control in human resources systems proves an essential ingredient for making general integrations become more automated and safe. The new cloud integration services and tools allow customers and partners to build, deploy, run and manage custom integrations for the numerous systems and applications.
