Business planning

It is important to understand the capability and capacity that you require from your system. The capability and capacity of your integration nodes are partly determined by the operation mode in which they are running, and this is determined by the IBM App Connect Enterprise license that you have purchased. For information about the features and modes of operation provided in each edition, see Choosing your IBM App Connect Enterprise operation mode.

It is also important to consider the most suitable technology for your business; this varies between projects and organizations, and there are various factors to consider when assessing your requirements:

• The pool of development skills available. For example, if your developers are already skilled in the use of ESQL, you might want to continue using this transformation technology. However, if you have strong Java™ skills, the JavaCompute node might be the better choice, rather than having to teach your Java developers ESQL.
• The ease with which you can teach developers a new development language. For example, if you have many developers it might be not be viable to teach all of them ESQL, and you might choose instead to educate only a few people who can then develop common functions or procedures.
• The skills of individual people. If your developers have relatively little experience with IBM App Connect Enterprise, you might find that the graphical interface provided by the Mapping node is more suitable than other transformation technologies.
• Asset reuse. If you are an existing user of IBM App Connect Enterprise, you might already have large amounts of ESQL code that you would like to reuse. You might also have other resources that you want to reuse, such as Java classes for key business processing, style sheets, or mappings. You might want to use these as the core of message flow processing and extend the processing with one of the other technologies.
• Performance. If message throughput is a prime consideration, you might choose to use ESQL or Java. For more information about designing your system for optimum performance, see Message flow design and performance and Code design and performance.
• Solution scalability, cost and flexibility. You might have an existing network infrastructure that you want to use, or you might want to take advantage of IBM App Connect Enterprise cloud capabilities. For more information on choosing a solution for your installation, see Cloud overview.