How do you position your company to anticipate the breakneck speed of industry disruption? Agile integration means you don’t.
How do you position your company to anticipate the breakneck speed of industry disruption?
You don’t, said a new ebook by Red Hat, which focuses on strategies to help businesses react quickly to change, rather than trying to game it.
The ebook, called “Agile Integration: The Blueprint for Enterprise Architecture”, said that as new disruptive players enter markets, organizations must switch gears in much shorter cycles than ever before.
But it’s not enough to roll out software faster, the ebook said. The software itself must be flexible and agile and designed to change course on the fly.
“An organization that can change pricing overnight or make new products available for sales overnight has an enormous advantage over one that requires a three-month staged roll out with a cascade of manual verification steps,” the ebook said.
The solution, according to Red Hat, is building an “infrastructure of agility”, or one that values a shorter life expectancy for plans, and an environment that cultivates new plans.
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The new architectural framework the ebook introduces, called “agile integration”, brings together three capabilities:
- Distributed integration, which uses messaging and enterprise integration patterns to integrate data and systems.
- Internal API management, which creates a reusable set of interfaces, allowing development teams to engage with applications and systems.
- Containers, which allow integration projects to be closely aligned with development and operational projects, and enable integrations to be developed, tested, and released similarly to software projects using DevOps methods.
Infrastructure agility, according to the ebook, creates an environment that encompasses all IT systems, including legacy software, and also considers the complexity of existing systems, different data types, data streams, and customer expectations, and ultimately a way to unify them.
“There is no single project that will rearchitect an entire organization to be agile,” the ebook said. “It may be more effective to implement one agile integration technology or change one area of the business and then extend those changes incrementally.”
