In this age of competition, organizations in every industry need to change their ways of doing business to survive as well as thrive. As per the research, disruption in the current business world accelerates the adoption of digital technological solutions. Those companies that made sure that they become successful in responding to the growing impact of disruption leveraged capabilities, including self-service integration and automation that other organizations did not.
Because organizations are weighed down with conventional, highly complex, and expensive technologies, such as Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), it’s difficult to transform and deliver. Not quite so long ago, ESB software solutions were considered revolutionary and organizations rested on them to build connections. These solutions required IT teams of those companies to create custom codes and build data mappings using SOAP protocol to connect data as well as applications to a respective communication bus. In addition, those IT developers require to encode business logic in these respective business connections.
IT developers found it difficult to implement custom codes and data mappings. But the bus offered a safe, comprehensive structure for the data as well as applications. When new business opportunities came into the picture, or regulations changed, and a business unit suddenly expected to update its business logic in response, the company would require to find out time and budget to create, test, and use new software for the ESB products.
With the world gaining pace and traction, the obvious impracticality of the approach became apparent. In the current times, ESBs are still around. A majority of companies still use them. The question lies in how companies can continue to use ESB solutions or take a different approach much faster approach to data integration.
A wide range of organizations is investing as much as 70 percent of their total IT budget on maintaining conventional, custom-codes, fragile ESB integration applications. They do that instead of adopting new data integration solutions that could transform companies.
Complexity: The growing complexity of this modernization becomes apparent as companies are able to collect all the release notes for various products that make up an ESB solution offering a single vendor. The printed release notes including, API guides and programming tutorials take a lot of time and effort. An ESB vendor provides six different versions of the solution. For that reason, integrations need to be revised to travel from various versions.
Elevated IT Intervention: Legacy ESB solutions require IT integrator teams to create codes and perform extensive data mappings to build integrations. Now, that takes six to 12 weeks for completion. Meanwhile, customers are forced to connect with business workers and receive the value they’ve been promised. Consequently, customers become happy and satisfied from doing business with the respective company again.
An Outdated Technology: Fewer organizations are using ESBs and that makes ESB analysts and programmers much more costly and rare. As a matter of fact, organizations switch to modern ESB solutions such as self-service data integration and automation to create new data connections and deliver the value promised to customers.
Self-service data integration solutions help organizations empower non-technical business users to create connections much more quickly than traditional methods. Business users can rely on features such as dashboards, intuitive screens, pre-built application connectors, AI-data mapping etc. to create data connections much faster than ever.
Non-technical business users need to point and click through easy-to-navigate screens to create onboarding connections 80 percent faster. When users can engage with business customers quickly, the waiting times experienced by customers will reach the bare minimum. As a result, companies can identify and meet the growing needs and demands much faster, turning them happy and satisfied. Those happy customers create new revenue streams in business as they are more likely to buy more products or services from the company. IT teams become free to focus on other high-value, critical business priorities.
Companies that rely on ESB integration solutions need to transform their approach to deliver value. They need to reimagine data integration solutions such as self-service data integration to manage the shift happening in the business world and deliver maximum value.
Chandra Shekhar is a product marketing enthusiast who likes to talk about business integration and how enterprises can gain a competitive edge by better customer data exchange. He has 8 years of experience in product marketing for SaaS companies.