By Preston Bice
Companies today are under increasing pressure to innovate while remaining cost-effective, efficient and compliant. The pandemic compressed about a decade’s worth of innovation into a year or two, setting the stage for a more cloud-centric, agile, and distributed future. Following this amazing burst of creativity, companies aren’t slowing down. Their competitors aren’t slowing down either. But at the same time they’re innovating faster than ever, companies can’t afford to disrupt their traditional revenue-generating operations.
At DXC and Boomi, we see customers wrestling with these challenges every day. Business and IT leaders are stuck with a juggling act: build the new while keeping the old running smoothly and reliably. What’s making this juggling act even more difficult? Being stuck with the complexity and technical debt that comes with legacy middleware technology.
When business leaders tell us about their challenges, we repeatedly hear stories about legacy middleware being a bottleneck to delivering strategic innovations fast enough.
For example, a retailer might want to offer a new mobile service to customers, pulling together account data, logistics data, and projected delivery times. The project moves quickly through the design phase, then hits a snag. It turns out the company’s middleware development team has a backlog of time-consuming projects. Integration work for the new app won’t be completed for six to nine months. Then the project can inch forward through internal and external testing. The final launch date turns out to be over a year away — 15 months is more likely. So much for business agility.
Another example: Imagine a company that wants to work more closely with its partners. One way to do this is to integrate its supply chain data and financial data. But the internal B2B commerce team is still relying on custom integrations and its legacy Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) for business connectivity. Onboarding and integrating even a single partner takes six to eight weeks on average. The work drags on, and the hoped-for business efficiencies that drove the project in the first place aren’t realized until two years later.
It’s clear to both DXC and Boomi that companies like these are struggling to advance the digital transformation projects they care so much about. They are also struggling to connect new IT projects with legacy technology assets for competitive advantage, including critical business applications such as ERP systems. And these same companies are trying to gradually replace legacy applications and the “brittle” integrations connecting them, so they can move forward and realize their plans for digital transformation.
Companies need a better way forward. They need a way that allows organizations to create and maintain more software — better, faster, and cheaper — across a rapidly changing ecosystem.
The question for business and IT leaders is this: How do you build the cloud-native future your company is boldly imagining while also supporting the business operations your company depends on?
The key is to get integration right.
Middleware Is the Foundation for IT Innovation and Business Growth
Middleware — the layer in your IT stack that connects data and applications across your organization and its IT resources — is the foundational element for getting modernization and innovation right. Ultimately, the pace and quality of integration determines the pace and quality of all your IT investments, new and old.
If your middleware technology is old, brittle, and costly to maintain — for example, if you’re still relying on an ESB from a decade ago or a complex patchwork of various technologies and approaches to integration — you’re simply not going to be able to move at the pace of today’s most agile and successful businesses.
To win in today’s fast-moving, highly competitive markets, you need to be able to achieve:
Accelerated development
You need your IT organization to be able to build integrations far more quickly. That means replacing the development work that used to take weeks or months with faster development cycles that can be completed in weeks or just days. When competitors can build integrations in just days, you can’t afford to take months carefully crafting new integrations by hand. You need to take advantage of low-code development tools to minimize the amount of work needed to build data integrations and transformations. Low-code development environments, for example, allow teams to reduce integration development times by 65%, according to Forrester.
Flexible deployment
You need to be able to connect more easily to the cloud and to run integration and transformation processes anywhere: in the cloud, in a multi-cloud environment, on premises or at the network edge. Legacy middleware wasn’t built with multi-cloud architectures and IoT devices in mind. It was built for an on-premises world in which uniform hardware provisioned by the IT department connected to applications running in a local data center. Today, about 60% of business data resides in the cloud. Enterprises need a middleware solution built for today’s highly distributed business environments. At the same time, you need to ensure you can connect to the legacy applications that are running essential parts of your business today.
Comprehensive data management, centralized
Because it builds the connections all IT initiatives, new and old, depend on, integration is the foundation for digital transformation as well as existing legacy operations. But there are other data capabilities that are also important for business — capabilities such as API management, data quality, workflow automations, data discovery and preparation, and support for EDI services. Look for an integration platform that supports these capabilities, too, so that integration doesn’t become a silo apart from other key data operations.
Composable business architecture
Gartner has championed the idea of composable applications made of software modules that can be combined quickly to address business opportunities quickly. In 2020, only 37% of IT organizations completed all the tasks in their plans. Clearly, companies need a way to move faster and more effectively with IT projects. Migrating to modern middleware and composable application architectures helps IT organizations get more done with the limited time and resources they have. By combining software modules that IT organizations have already built and tested, developers can more quickly assemble and deploy the IT solutions business units need.
A Key Ingredient for Success: Breadth of Expertise
Modernizing an organization’s IT domain on a continuous basis is a non-negotiable fact, and insulating old from new by adopting modern integration technology and techniques is needed to facilitate this change on business terms – risk, timing, budgets, external constraints, etc. Modernization can be a daunting task and sometimes you need a partner to help you adopt new integration technology, a partner that has expertise bridging the gap between old and new integration architectures.
Too often, service providers fall into one category or the other. They’re either experts in — and still committed to — ESBs and other legacy integration technologies that were innovative fifteen years ago. Or they’re a young, cutting-edge shop well versed on the latest cloud technology, pleased to never have to learn about ESBs, SOA, or last-generation technology, ever. But if you’re interested in migrating your business to new technology, you really need a partner who is fluent in both worlds.
That’s why DXC and Boomi have partnered to help companies modernize middleware, building the foundation companies need for their digital transformation initiatives. Why wait — together, we can help you turn middleware from an obstacle to an enabler.