The hidden barrier to innovation: Why integration needs a platform strategy

Despite the billions of dollars spent on application modernization and the extraordinary amounts spent on new enterprise solutions and cloud migrations, CIOs face continuing challenges in extracting actionable insight.

Without doubt, individual investments can deliver outstanding results. For example, SAP and Salesforce have transformed many organizations. At the same time, these new solutions can lead to siloed information. As each new piece joins the already sprawling puzzle, integration efforts are often an afterthought.

Integration solutions often function as patches, with multiple vendors dealing with different integration subjects—and sometimes, with multiple vendors covering the same issues (such as apps and data integration, services orchestration, API and event management, business-to-business, managed file transfer, mainframe integration, and more). Solutions originally designed to reduce complexity add to the complexity.

And the CIO must play catch-up while the business races ahead. A platform strategy can deliver a significant competitive advantage for CIOs that seek to enable agility and prepare the business for the future.

Bonfiglioli, a global power transmission and automation specialist, illustrates these real-world business issues. With multiple legacy IT systems, releasing and sharing data to create new services was costly and slow.

“We had an old-fashioned integration layer,” said Fabio Zoboli, integration architect for Bonfiglioli. “It worked well enough, but it was slow and there were compatibility issues to address every time we added anything new. It simply wasn’t ready for cloud-native deployments, the creation of APIs or real-time data sharing with third parties. Not to mention all the other capabilities we would need if we were to succeed in our digital transformation in a multicloud, multiuser environment.”

These challenges are common across sectors. Hellmann Worldwide Logistics needed to connect and analyze the data that remained spread across and trapped within multiple on-premises, hybrid and cloud environments, spanning more than 750 systems and applications. This infrastructure includes a complex mix of transport, warehousing and ERP systems, data and processes—on whose security, availability, robustness and performance Hellmann depends.

For many years, this integration challenge has been accepted as a business-as-usual problem. But as AI revolutionizes industries, there is a demand for access to coherent, curated data. Businesses are discovering the hard way that the lack of integration strategy shows up as a business-critical weakness.

The constant IT revolution continues, even as AI permeates industries. Migration to the cloud rushes ahead, hybrid cloud grows, private cloud blossoms, application modernization grinds onwards, and new apps emerge.

The typical enterprise IT landscape spans a vast and diverse mix of solutions, platforms, protocols, tactics, short-term fixes, abandoned projects, and more. Dealing with legacy is standard, managing today’s crisis is normal, and planning for tomorrow is tomorrow’s task.

According to a 2023 Forrester report “Legacy operational systems struggle to keep up with modern business needs, but rip-and-replace is often too costly. A proper integration architecture centered on business interfaces provides a way forward. Middleware such as APIs, event brokers and integration platform as a service (iPaaS) are key tools in building an architecture that creates efficient ways to modernize legacy systems.”

However, middleware from multiple vendors has led to the complexity-on-complexity era. If the middleware itself is composed of many fragments, each update or new version can impact reliability with unexpected design changes. The resulting patchwork underperforms and is costly to maintain.

The alternative is to build a platform view of integration, with a common technical architecture that enables components to be added to a shared middleware environment in a structured, standardized way. The common platform can enable simplified, centralized management and control through a single interface. The solution capability can be expanded by adding components to the existing spine.

This approach implies a complete change from short-term fixes to long-term resolutions. A strategic middleware platform must handle the challenges of hybrid cloud and AI, and it must be scalable to billions of transactions. To avoid adding to complexity, the core platform must gain rapid adoption as the unified, standardized, centralized integration solution.

The platform view removes the challenges of interoperability, simplifies operations, and streamlines the user experience. An end-to-end platform, with integration functionality delivered by specific modules designed to a shared standard, creates a highly productive middleware layer that can scale up rapidly and without the trappings of complexity.

Further, the single platform might remove six or ten vendor solutions and replace them with a consistent way of working that is more productive and efficient. Some enterprises have as many as 15 integration disciplines with more than one tool for each, which means they can unlock even greater savings when they switch to a single platform approach.

Bonfiglioli and Hellman both chose the single platform approach, selecting IBM® webMethods and achieving great success.

“Though our IT team is relatively small, webMethods is so capable it allows us to be completely independent,” says Fabio Zoboli. “It’s simple to use, and setup took just a couple of months. Now we can manage everything ourselves, including creating our own complex APIs in a matter of days. The new integration platform works well with our Salesforce, Microsoft 365 and other SaaS services, and the webMethods microservices runtime can be deployed in cloud-native infrastructures, including Microsoft Azure, our strategic cloud platform. WebMethods covers all our integration needs.”

“WebMethods integration supports our logistics company to be well equipped for the future,” said Peter Schenk, head of IT governance, IT supporting functions and platforms at Hellman. “The platform is the high-performance and scalable basis for the data and process integrations that our company, customers and partners need—as well as for the digitization of our global value chain.”

Exactly as a platform strategy for integration can help drive the AI-readiness of an enterprise, the platform can enable a consistent strategy for its own AI capabilities.

Across a single integration platform, all modules can benefit from reliable, consistent, transparent AI features, with enterprise-level governance. For example, as agentic AI matures, the same capabilities can be enabled in each integration discipline, avoiding rework and maximizing the value of existing AI assets.

The composability of the integration as a platform strategy—in AI, API, events and more—delivers enterprise scale, enterprise governance, enterprise agility and enterprise efficiency. With a unified control plane for all integration disciplines, CIOs and IT teams can manage even the most complex hybrid, cloud, on-premises, mainframe and third-party environments, with end-to-end visibility of every component.

Enterprise strategies change gradually and then dramatically. History has shown how monolithic legacy applications have delivered immense efficiency and productivity benefits, yet that approach has matured into today’s componentized as-a-service strategy.

In this process, middleware and integration services have largely been overlooked. Software vendors continue to release (and enterprises continue to deploy) single solutions that silo information. The inability to integrate enterprise data easily and effectively has become a major barrier to innovation and success.

Integration as a platform solves the complexity-on-complexity challenges and introduces new levels of capability and performance. By choosing a platform capable of supporting all integration types, enterprises can move to an architecture that reduces operational costs, simplifies administration and enables faster deployment in response to business demands.

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