Published on the 24/07/2014 | Written by Newsdesk
Integration platforms which allow applications, data and cloud services to be woven together into a seamless computing fabric are also being credited with allowing legacy systems to be replaced by stealth…
Integration Platform as a Service emerged on Gartner’s radar earlier this year when the analyst created its first magic quadrant looking at the leading players in the market.
Driving demand for integration services is the rapid increase in cloud deployments.
Not all of these systems are deployed by IT; a fair proportion of cloud services represent “shadow IT” bought by executives using the corporate credit card to plug a need for a computing solution not readily on offer from the IT department. Gartner estimates that as much as 35 percent of IT investment now takes place outside of the IT budget.
Integration platforms (from middleware to IPaaS) are increasingly being used in IT shops to weave together existing on-premise systems with cloud services – regardless of who bought them – to form a more cohesive computing fabric. They are also providing CIOs with a way to wind down their reliance on legacy platforms without forcing them into a big bang refresh.
MuleSoft, one of the integration platforms identified as a leader in Gartner’s magic quadrant, has been adopted locally by Deakin and Victoria Universities, New Zealand Post and Toyota.
The company was set up in 2006, forged out of the 2003 open source initiative called Mule which was intended to take the “donkey work out of integration”.
The integration platform which emerged is also being used at Dick Smith Electronics across A/NZ to allow the company’s IT department to respond swiftly to shifting business requirements – and eventually as a mechanism to allow the company to transition off its legacy platforms.
Dick Smith general manager of IT, Paul Keen, said the MuleSoft platform allowed the company to “integrate really really fast”. He said that when the marketing department wanted to hook into eBay’s systems for a campaign, that was achieved in a couple of days. When marketing wanted to offer a deal through CatchoftheDay, Keen was given just a week to integrate Dick Smith’s systems with CatchoftheDay’s platform.
“If you are going to innovate fast you need to integrate fast and reliably,” said Keen.
Keen said that the integration platform would also allow Dick Smith to slowly transition – almost by stealth he agreed – off its legacy platforms. He said that to move off legacy to a modern, but monolithic system, could take three years, which was too long and probably too costly for the organisation to stomach.
Instead he plans to continue to leverage MuleSoft in order to migrate functions to new applications, mainly in the cloud, while using the platform to ensure that these remained fully integrated with the legacy on-premise systems still used by Dick Smith, but over time he said this would eventually render the legacy platform redundant.
The ability to allow legacy platforms to co-exist with cloud or newer software is one of the key benefits of integration platforms according to MuleSoft which said they allowed IT shops to “sweat the assets” in a legacy portfolio for much longer as it was possible to integrate new platforms with old systems.
The company set up its Asia Pacific headquarters in Sydney in early 2013, led by Will Bosma, and has now grown to a team of around 18 people. The company this week announced that it had appointed Jonathan Stern as the regional vice president for Australia and New Zealand.
It also announced that with more than 200 connectors already available to allow different software and cloud systems to be woven together into a sort of enterprise computing fabric, a range of solutions that allow Microsoft applications to be integrated with other systems and cloud services had been added to the MuleSoft portfolio.
