By 2028, the International Data Corporation (IDC) anticipates the application landscape will become more complex. This complexity will come from many aspects—uncontrolled growth, diverse technologies, decentralized adoption, siloed departments and redundant systems. This situation presents a critical challenge for enterprise business and IT leaders: how do we harness the potential of new application innovation without succumbing to an unmanageable sprawl of disconnected systems?
The journey toward hybrid cloud, multicloud environments and the integration of AI hinges on two factors—the seamless flow of data and the efficient interaction of diverse apps. Yet, the current reality for many organizations is far from this ideal.
Decades of point-to-point integrations and siloed, point-in-time solutions have created the chaos of connectivity: a tangled web of bespoke connections that are brittle, difficult to maintain and expensive to evolve.
This fragmented landscape breeds islands of automation, hinders agility and inflates operational costs, effectively acting as a delay on innovation. Many organizations are held back by monolithic systems that lack the interoperability needed to thrive.
The solution lies in embracing a fundamental shift in architectural thinking: the move toward composable systems, powered by the strategic deployment of a hybrid integration platform as a service (iPaaS).
A composable IT architecture is built from modular and reusable components that make it easy to assemble and change. Because it is designed for continuous evolution, this system is flexible enough to adapt to rapidly evolving business needs and agile enough to respond to market disruptions.
Composable architectures allow organizations to assemble and reassemble business capabilities like building blocks, fostering a level of reusability and adaptability previously unattainable.
With composable architecture, three key personas emerge:
• Creators and providers: Developers and IT professionals design, build and display the foundational building blocks (the application programming interfaces (APIs), events and microservices) by using iPaaS development studios.
• Curators: Architects and experienced IT professionals define, govern and maintain a catalog of reusable assets. They can ensure discoverability, security and compliance of APIs, events and microservices by using an iPaaS catalog or marketplace.
• Composers: Business technologists (line-of-business experts, business analysts, data scientists and domain specialists) understand the specific needs and processes within their areas. They use intuitive, often low-code or no-code tools to assemble business capabilities into new applications that use iPaaS workflows.
Making composability a reality requires a conscious and strategic effort. While the underlying technologies evolve, the foundational principles of service-oriented architecture (SOA) remain highly relevant even today. These principles include standard contracts, loose coupling and abstraction. They also help ensure that software components of composable architectures can interact seamlessly without creating brittle dependencies.
To build a truly composable architecture, organizations need three key elements, all facilitated by a modern hybrid iPaaS:
• Composable assets: These assets are the reusable building blocks (APIs, events and microservices) created and maintained by developers and IT professionals that use the iPaaS development studio. They focus on the design aspect.
• Composable catalog: A well-governed and easily discoverable catalog or marketplace of assets is crucial. Architects and curators use the iPaaS catalog functions to help ensure discoverability, enforce governance policies and manage the lifecycle of composable components. This process focuses on discovery and governance.
• Composition: Here is where the magic happens. Business technologists, empowered by the iPaaS workflow orchestration capabilities, can drag and drop prebuilt capabilities into a no-code or low-code palette to construct multistep business processes and applications. They can orchestrate complex workloads without needing deep technical knowledge of the underlying APIs, events or microservices.
A critical enabler of composability is event-driven architecture (EDA). In the modern enterprise, significant business moments occur constantly: a purchase order is received, a shipment is dispatched, a new customer registers. These events are becoming a core business vocabulary.
EDA allows businesses to react swiftly to these events immediately, triggering instant back-end responses and changes. By managing a large volume of such events across various functions, organizations can achieve new levels of efficiency and responsiveness.
The path forward lies in embracing a composable architecture built upon such reusable components: APIs, events and microservices. These elements are the fundamental building blocks that business technologists can use to rapidly prototype, test and deploy new systems and capabilities.
Imagine being able to construct a new customer service portal by assembling prebuilt APIs for customer profiles, order history and support ticketing. This agility is not limited to a single industry; the principles of composability are broadly applicable across diverse sectors. Many use cases highlight the versatility of this approach.
There is immense potential for an integration landscape where AI acts as an intelligent orchestrator at every stage, fundamentally reshaping how systems connect and communicate.
This isn't about bolting AI onto existing processes—it's about weaving it into the very fabric of integration, unlocking new levels of productivity for both technical experts and business users alike.
By embracing this AI-driven approach, organizations can pave the way for future AI advancements, establishing a robust foundation for sophisticated interactions and intelligent automation.
Consider the possibilities of AI autonomously constructing integrations from diverse sources, empowering users of all technical abilities to build, test, deploy and monitor complex connections with remarkable ease.
Envision AI agents taking charge of API management, intelligently discovering existing interfaces, generating specifications and underlying code from natural language descriptions—helping ensure adherence to governance policies and even automatically creating and running tests that can ensure API quality.
With a holistic application of AI to integration along with a unified control point for managing AI services, organizations can accelerate their readiness for an AI-powered future—transforming connectivity into a dynamic and intelligent engine for innovation and efficiency.
Banking: In the competitive financial services sector, rapid customer onboarding is paramount. A bank with a composable architecture can create seamless onboarding experiences by orchestrating reusable account management services, identity verification APIs and compliance checks—helping to significantly reduce time-to-value for new customers.
Logistics: The ability to deliver goods faster and at lower costs is a constant pursuit in logistics. A composable fulfillment process, built from modular services for order processing, warehouse management and shipping that allows organizations to quickly adapt to disruptions, optimize routes and ultimately improve the shipping experience. This process often involves integrating various interfaces and formats for data exchange.
Healthcare: Providing hyperpersonalized care requires a holistic view of patient data. A composable architecture enables the integration of data from disparate sources, including wearable devices. This architecture allows healthcare providers to build real-time patient monitoring applications and proactively manage health outcomes—creating a better digital experience and streamlining content management.
Composable architecture empowers organizations to build their next-generation apps by using tested and trusted APIs, events and microservices, all within a self-contained service environment. A simple composition might involve dragging a customer authentication API, a product inventory API and a payment processing API onto a canvas and connecting them to create a new e-commerce app.
The complexity can be gradually increased based on specific business requirements, all orchestrated by business technologists who understand the wanted outcome without needing to delve into the technical intricacies. The scalability of these composable systems is a key advantage, allowing businesses to handle increasing workloads on-demand.
Ultimately, composability enables the democratization of application development while maintaining essential governance. This leads to higher productivity across the organization, allowing both IT professionals and business users to contribute to building and evolving the enterprise’s digital capabilities.
The promise is clear: develop anywhere, deploy anywhere and adapt to anything. As organizations increasingly rely on a complex tech stack, the interoperability and flexibility of a composable infrastructure become paramount. The future of the agile, resilient and innovative enterprise is undeniably composable.
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