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Common B2B SaaS Integration Patterns and When to Use Them

According to a recent survey, the number of SaaS companies has grown to more than 25,000 worldwide. In general, businesses that subscribe to SaaS products work with multiple SaaS vendors and expect that the apps will integrate with each other. To address this, some SaaS companies build bespoke integrations into their apps, while others go with an embedded integration platform to address their customers' integration needs.

Regardless of the approach you are taking for integrations with your app, you'll find that most integrations should fit into a few common patterns. Knowing these patterns will help whether you find yourself in the midst of an integration project, just getting started with building out your API, or in the early days of planning a new SaaS app.

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Cloud-Based Integrations vs. On-Premise Models

This is an article from DZone's 2022 Enterprise Application Integration Trend Report.

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Read the Report

For large enterprises, where integration with different platforms is important for various business activities, enterprise integration is the most popular term for the integration architecture. Enterprise integration has evolved a lot from traditional batch processing using ETL (extract, transform, and load), where data feeds from sources were used for business processing/ transformation and loading to the target data source. 

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When To Use Apache Camel vs. Apache Kafka?

Should I use Apache Camel or Apache Kafka for my next integration project? The question is very valid and comes up regularly. This blog post explores both open-source frameworks and explains the difference between application integration and event streaming. The comparison discusses when to use Kafka or Camel when to combine them, and when not to use them at all. A decision tree shows how you can quickly qualify one for the other.

The History of Application Integration and Event Streaming

My personal history and experience in application integration and event streaming are the following. It shows my background and how I see the integration and data streaming markets.

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Choreo Is neither aPaaS, nor iPaaS

Background

WSO2 has been building enterprise software since 2005 and the team has been working with 1000s of enterprise customers ever since. WSO2’s products cover a range of capabilities from API Management (APIM), Integration, Stream Processing, and Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM). All these product capabilities are available to the users as installable software (binaries) that can be installed on customers' choice of infrastructures such as physical servers, virtual machines, and cloud infrastructure. In addition to these installable versions, WSO2 has offered these functionalities as a cloud (SaaS) solution via WSO2 Cloud. This SaaS offering was a scalable installation of WSO2 products on a shared cloud infrastructure which did not provide many capabilities beyond the installable components’ functionality.

WSO2 team has identified this as a limitation of the platform given the fact that most enterprises are moving towards cloud and cloud-native solutions. After several years of RnD efforts, the WSO2 team is thrilled to announce the General Availability (GA) of Choreo on 30th March 2022. The official announcement can be found here.

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Modernizing an IBM-MQ Application With Kong and TriggerMesh on Kubernetes

Introduction

While it seems that everyone is migrating their applications to the cloud, there are still a lot of legacy applications that cannot be moved easily. This is the case for old system of records running on mainframes that you interact with using IBM-MQ. With the enterprise application landscape being a set of APIs, exposing a REST API in front of IBM-MQ so that you expose your system of record to a modern world is crucial. Typically, this can be done with expensive integration solutions like MuleSoft.

 In this post, however, we are going to show you how you can use the Kong API Gateway and the TriggerMesh open source system to expose a REST API in front of an event driven integration to interact with IBM-MQ. In other words, you can front your asynchronous event flow with a synchronous API ⁠— the same thing you can do with MuleSoft, but using open-source technologies.

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Apache Kafka in the Public Sector – Part 3: Government and Citizen Services

The public sector includes many different areas. Some groups leverage cutting-edge technology, like military leverage. Others like the public administration are years or even decades behind. This blog series explores how the public sector leverages data in motion powered by Apache Kafka to add value for innovative new applications and modernizing legacy IT infrastructures. 

This post is part 3: Use cases and architectures for Government and Citizen Services.

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When To Use Reverse ETL and When It Is an Anti-pattern

Most enterprises store their massive volumes of transactional and analytics data at rest in data warehouses or data lakes. Sales, marketing, and customer success teams require access to these data sets. Reverse ETL is a buzzword that defines the concept of collecting data from existing data stores to provide it easy and quick for business teams.

This blog post explores why software vendors (try to) introduce new solutions for Reverse ETL, when it is needed, and how it fits into the enterprise architecture. The involvement of event streaming with tools like Apache Kafka to process data in motion is a crucial piece of Reverse ETL for real-time use cases.

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iPaaS for Mobile Developers

Thinking of building the next big mobile application? The time to market of a mobile application is critical in the current fast-paced industry. Deciding if it’s an Android or an iOS application is just one part of the problem. Most of today’s applications need a backend system to carry out their operations. Features like remote data storage/syncing, authentication, and user communication require a set of backend services to be available.

So, how can we develop these backend systems for mobile applications? There are two main patterns for doing this. The first is to do direct integration.

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What Is Low-Code

Today’s business world is very competitive and challenging. Organizations face higher demand for initiatives in digital transformation. Digital transformation enables businesses to become more agile and innovative. This requires qualified developers who can work rapidly and accurately to create complex business applications and processes. Handwritten code has some risks associated with that as it can have longer delivery times, and the changes can be very costly. Also, the outcome is highly dependent on skilled developers. 

Most organizations are looking for developers, which has created a shortage of skilled developers. The lack of experienced developers is hitting the productivity of the digital transformation journey, which has forced organizations to look for alternatives. This article by Betsy Atkins on Forbes claims that the most disruptive trend in 2021 is low-code.

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Traditional iPaaS Doesn’t Work for Software Companies – Here’s Why

It’s no surprise that software integration is a hot topic these days. Or that there’s a growing number of iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) solutions that help companies build integrations between all the different applications they use.

Businesses are using more and more unique applications as part of their day-to-day operations. That presents challenges like siloed data and disjointed workflows, creating a need to easily connect those applications.

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Designing a Successful API Strategy

Companies today realize that smart data strategy is fundamental for business success. They invest and spend resources to make sure data is protected, stored, and backed up. But, it’s just as important to manage the communication of data and ensure its seamless flow not only internally, but also with external sources, such as partners and clients. This is where APIs (application programming interfaces) come in. APIs enable applications and services to communicate. In a data-driven and multi-cloud world, APIs are essential to your business, and it’s important to develop a strategy around APIs. This is the first in a series of blog posts on API management.

A successful API strategy needs to include two essential concepts:

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A Journey From MuleSoft to Serverless Integration

In the current highly volatile market trend the cost optimization, infinite scalability, and agile development tools are very vital for any enterprise digital roadmap. The fast-growing trend of FaaS world with AWS Lambda, Google Cloud function, and Azure Fn has already received recognition of small, medium, and large enterprises and this indicates that the move from the iPaaS to FaaS is natural and unavoidable. This move opens a new world of Serverless Integration.

The key features of serverless integration are:

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4 Ways an Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) Fuels Efficiency

One of the major challenges that many companies face nowadays is cloud integration. As a rule, most enterprises are known for using multiple systems, each of them operating separately on a different platform, each playing a significant part but none of them integrated. In such a case, the company has all the chances not only to lose important data but also to create chaos in the business processes. Integration technology will serve here as a great solution to allow companies to control all their work infrastructure.

Defining iPaaS

iPaaS is a sort of conduit that links separate applications that companies use. The platform unifies all the existing information, allowing enterprises to integrate all their data.

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Integration as a Platform (iPaaS) Is Changing Enterprise Integration

The integration platform as a service (iPaaS) market is not just growing, it is accelerating. iPaaS is a cloud service that provides a platform to support applications that involve a combination of data sources, cloud-based applications, and others.

Digital transformation requires more compelling customer touch points, which means businesses need to integrate more systems, people, and things than ever before. With requests for integration between applications (both in the cloud and on-premises) on the rise, the job of creating and managing those connections can become overwhelmingly complex.

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Four Tips for Evaluating a Cloud Integration Platform

Scores of companies are shifting their technology infrastructure to the cloud. Rather than bear the burden of managing their own data centers, they've handed the reigns over to experts in the domain of computing and data storage - Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and other cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers. These cloud adopters are enjoying greater agility, cost-savings, and system reliability as a result.

After seeing the benefits of cloud infrastructure, many are considering cloud solutions for their integration processes.

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A Digital Transformation Story: Enterprise Integration Through a DevOps-Driven iPaaS API Architecture, Part 1

The Problem Domain: A Typical Enterprise Technology Landscape

The enterprise IT landscape of a corporate house typically consists of a conglomerate of disparate technology stacks — ranging from huge legacy proprietary monoliths hosting the systems of records to the modern componentized systems of engagements. The very diverse nature of the 360-degree landscape involves diverse skills, reciprocal governance needs, and completely different program governance strategies. The problem at hand is how to integrate such a complex landscape. 

Figure 1: An interconnected but disparate enterprise technology landscape

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5 Key Benefits of iPaaS

A real challenge that businesses and IT teams across many organizations face today is establishing an integrated network that matches the flexibility of the on-prem and cloud applications. While you can have several highly functional cloud applications to cover finance, customers, logistics and e-commerce needs respectively, there is no guarantee that these applications will work together. If you can’t share information between these key business areas, what use are these software applications? 

This increasingly critical need has paved the way for purpose-built iPaaS services that help companies handle the integration requirements of today’s business environment, future-proof their integration solutions and increase the value of their IT investments.

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Cleaning MuleSoft CloudHub Resources: A DevOps Approach

Introduction

MuleSoft provides excellent business agility to companies by connecting applications, data, and devices, both on-premises and in the cloud with an API-led approach. Together, APIs and DevOps deliver greater business value than what they can deliver individually.

DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization's ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products over the time.