Why partner on-boarding needs a hybrid integration platform (HIP)

Why HIP?

Digital transformations tend to focus on the desired high-level benefits such as greater efficiency and profitability, more operational and business agility, and better customer experience. This top-level view overlooks a major, pivotal element of digitalization which is foundational to the success of all transformation efforts – integration.

Integration is what pulls technology initiatives together into a cohesive, actionable strategy. It is especially important as communications service providers (CSPs) of all sizes and types evolve into extended enterprises – that is delivering services, solutions, and products via an ecosystem of partners through platform-based business and operational models.

This shift to platform models is only part of the story though: CSPs are running their IT systems across many different infrastructures, from on-premise, to public, private, hybrid and multi-cloud. Integration is what enables them to work seamlessly, and the systems to become infrastructure agnostic.

As digital initiatives accelerate, integration is a critical factor in determining the success and speed of digital transformation. What’s more, integration’s importance and impact are expanding all the time as:

• Integration is essential to enable companies to evolve into extended enterprises, offering services, products and solutions to customers as part of an ecosystem.
• Applications run across different kinds of infrastructure and straddle boundaries, such as a company’s own data centers and public, private or hybrid cloud, or even multi-cloud. The backend of an organization typically runs traditional back-office systems and applications in parallel with those on the cloud.
• Integration is also at the heart of other defining characteristics of digital companies, such as the fact they are data-driven, which means being able to pull data from varied, multiple sources to extract intelligence from them with analytics, and, increasingly, AI.
• Integration is an intrinsic element of automation, which is most useful when implemented from end to end, rather in islands. Automation can only ever be as good as and as extensive as the integration that underpins it.
• During digital transformation initiatives, integration often becomes a bottleneck with demand outstripping enterprises’ capacity. Also, the scope of traditional integration tools and approaches are unequal to the new tasks asked of them because they weren’t designed for those purposes, which makes progress slow, expensive, and unsustainable

Gartner’s solution to many faceted challenge of transforming integration as an enabler of wider digitalization efforts is the hybrid integration platform or HIP. The ‘hybrid’ in HIP describes the essential co-existence of legacy and modern integration technologies as part of digital transformation.

Shooting for transformation from the hybrid integration platform

What should a HIP offer?

It is likely that some application teams are already updating and extending their tools to support the migration to cloud services, mobile apps, IoT and AI, for instance. Typically, they are using integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS), often with an API management platform, and these two elements form the core of hybrid integration platform.

An iPaaS provides subscribers or tenants with the capabilities to implement integration projects involving any combination of cloud-resident and on-premises endpoints, including APIs, mobile devices and IoT. This is done by developing, deploying, managing and monitoring integration processes and flows that connect multiple endpoints, allowing them to work together efficiently.

However, many companies have a piecemeal approach to digitalization, which means many prototype HIPs lack some necessary functions and cannot deal with the most demanding integration tasks.

In Gartner’s view, a successful hybrid integration platform needs to include these four dimensions:

• Personas or constituents, such as integration specialists, ad hoc integrators, citizen integrators and digital integrators
• Integration domains like applications, data, processes and B2B
• Endpoints ranging from on-premise devices to cloud, mobile and IoT devices
• Deployment models – on-premise, multiple cloud environments, a hybrid of on-premise and multiple clouds, and embedded IoT devices

The anatomy of a hybrid integration platform and how it helps

Many CSPs are committed to taking the HIP path to transformation, but don’t know where to start, what to prioritize, to identify what should remain as legacy integration and what should be modernized, or what their overall integration landscape should look like. On top of grappling with new technologies and the greater urgency for digital transformation that has been underscored by the pandemic, it is too difficult to attempt digitalization without specialist help. This includes integration transformation, which is at the heart of the wider effort, but is unchartered territory for most.

The ‘hybrid’ in HIP describes the essential co-existence of legacy and modern integration technologies as part of digital transformation. In the sample table below, there will be a progressive move to the newer tools and approaches, which form the building blocks of modern integrations.

The best way to approach any highly challenging and complicated task is to break it down into manageable, contiguous steps. Transforming integration with a HIP is no exception.

This is reflected in the specialist consulting and implementation services offered by Torry Harris Integration Solutions (THIS), specific to integration transformation and the HIP approach.

Setting up governance for integration

Governance is critical to the success of all transformation, and arguably even more important when you have a HIP as teams may not be aware of how the company is going about transforming its legacy IT to a modern stack and how to maintain the right level of hybrid integration. Having witnessed and addressed these issues first-hand with clients, THIS launched its integration governance and empowerment framework.

Good governance sets up the structure and processes required to produce the desired results for all stakeholders, making the best use of an enterprise’s resources at any given time.

As a foundation, governance must identify three key profiles:

• The beneficiary is the individual or team that assumes the responsibility for delivering the expected benefits of digitalization to the intended, select community of users.
• The enabler is the team tasked with modifying or adding elements to legacy / back-end assets to meet the enterprise’s digital needs.
• The catalyst is the team that aligns the beneficiary’s priorities with the enabler’s change roadmap. To put it another way, the catalyst is responsible for delivering the integrated experience.

The governance and empowerment framework facilitates good governance, allowing the initiative to evolve, and iteratively present best practices based on results. The framework is also designed to enable cohesive integration across the enterprise so that all elements are connected, rationalized and organized to provide consistent guidance and incentives that executives and leaders of business units require.