IBM webMethods Hybrid Integration: Integration for the agentic AI era

Today at IBM Think 2025, we are announcing IBM webMethods Hybrid Integration, which reimagines integration for the AI era with a unified experience across all integration scenarios.

Bringing together AI, APIs, apps, events, files, B2B/EDI and mainframe data—each of which plays a crucial role in powering today’s enterprises—can unleash incredible productivity.

While AI helps to unlock new value for enterprises, those that can seamlessly connect their systems, data, people and processes will truly create real technology advantage. There is no AI without integration, and we’re excited to take a major step forward for our clients and partners. It will be Generally Available in mid-June 2025.

Enterprises today demand more than ever from their tech stacks amid a rush of rapid change: business imperatives to derive value from AI; the increasing sprawl of APIs, Kafka and integrations; and ongoing waves of digital transformation. Yet most tech stacks strain under the complexity of these demands, unable to evolve into an AI-ready foundation for innovation.

IBM webMethods Hybrid Integration provides comprehensive development, deployment, management and monitoring of diverse integration patterns across on-premises and multicloud landscapes. It builds upon IBM's top-rated integration capabilities, uniting them in a single pane of glass. It bridges the gap between existing investments and next-gen integration technology, whether accessing data inside mainframes and simplifying B2B data exchange or leveraging AI agents with IBM watsonx.

Designed to enable rapid action across distributed environments, IBM webMethods Hybrid Integration provides shared tools and assets, plus centralized control through a hybrid control plane. It facilitates centralized management, streamlining time-intensive operations and troubleshooting for already-overloaded IT teams. 

By unifying multiple integration patterns and deployments, users gain visibility and end-to-end monitoring across their integration estate. Centralizing governance can help clients deliver productivity gains, while enabling centralized authentication and addressing compliance and security, all contribute to a more resilient yet agile business.

AI is not an add-on to integration; we see it as a fundamental shift in the way enterprise integration is performed, at every step of the development lifecycle. This release of IBM webMethods Hybrid Integration leverages agentic AI to enhance integration use cases, delivering productivity gains for specialist and line-of-business users. It also empowers organizations to accelerate their AI-readiness by laying the foundations for advancements such as model context protocol (MCP) and agent control protocol (ACP).

The Integration Agent leverages IBM watsonx-powered AI to boost productivity by automatically generating integrations across language-based SDKs, APIs and events. Developers and nontechnical users can lean into agentic features to build, test, deploy and monitor complex integrations.

Leveraging advanced agentic AI, the API Agent can autonomously plan and execute API management actions such as:

• Discovering existing APIs based on natural language input, addressing redundancy to increase development efficiency.

• Creating API specifications and backend code through natural language supporting code-first and design-first approaches with assistance to improve documentation and fixing errors.

• Supporting API governance by validating specs with rulesets to ensure APIs align with best practices and policies.

• Testing APIs to enhance API quality by automatically generating test cases and executing them.

Providing visibility and control of AI services, the AI Gateway offers a single control point for routing AI interactions, helping enterprises manage costs by tracking token usage, setting quotas to prevent overspend and caching responses to avoid spending tokens on repetitive calls. The AI Gateway can help accelerate your AI journey with features such as:

• Self-service registration for internal teams to use AI APIs, getting developers up and running faster.

• Policies for token-based rate limiting and response caching.

• Dashboards showing usage across models and providers.

Recognizing the critical nature of trading partner ecosystems, IBM webMethods Hybrid Integration includes robust B2B integration capabilities. Self-serve onboarding and management accelerate partner engagement and streamline interactions across different environments.

Now with the IBM Sterling B2B Integration VAN, enterprises can swiftly connect and transact with over 3.1 million trading partners via IBM webMethods Hybrid Integration. This can help optimize business data exchange and automate critical workflows. When combined with application integration, this aims to create seamless end-to-end process automation connecting internal systems with external partners.

Tomorrow’s tech stack will thrive on dynamic, scalable and intelligent integrations that adapt in real time to evolving business needs. Event-driven architecture and API-driven automation are critical to thriving in the “Now Economy,” which demands that businesses react to real-time data to provide superior customer experiences and optimize business operations to outperform competitors. Modern integration strategies must leverage a dynamic, event-driven architecture that is treated as a core integration pattern, replacing static workflows for real-time business that spans legacy and modern systems.

• Event Endpoint Management unifies and streamlines integration with events by enabling events to be discovered and consumed by any permissioned user and manage event sources like APIs to reuse them across the enterprise. It is built to work with Kafka implementations or event brokers that implement the Kafka Protocol.

• API-driven composability empowers architects to assemble and reconfigure APIs like building blocks to create flexible, reusable, and scalable integrations. Asset reuse and modularity are core principles that translate into faster time-to-market for business needs.

Integration is always evolving and IBM has been committed to being at the forefront of enterprise integration since its inception. We recognize the deep investments our clients have made in technologies such as mainframe, as well as the evolving need for modern, consumption-based pricing. With the launch of IBM webMethods Hybrid Integration, we continue to build upon these investments and worrk with clients seeking to modernize not only their technology stacks but also their operating and pricing models.

• Unlocking mainframe data and services: Tapping into the incredible value of data stored in mainframes, IBM webMethods Hybrid Integration is engineered to make mainframe services accessible to integration developers.

• Consumption-based pricing: IBM webMethods Hybrid Integration offers enterprises flexibility with transaction-based consumption pricing for greater cost control. Clients can benefit from predictable, yet flexible pricing that allows them to scale their integration usage up or down based on actual needs, paying only for what they use.

IBM webMethods Hybrid Integration represents a significant step for enterprise integration, offering not just technology, but a strategic advantage in navigating the complexities of modern integration, enhancing agility, and accelerating innovation.

Are you ready to build upon your existing investments, infuse them with unified, hybrid integration built for the AI era, and unlock new growth? IBM webMethods Hybrid Integration will be Generally Available 16 June 2025.

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