Published November 17, 2021
November 2021 is a good month if you’re a Fortune 500 or Global 2000 enterprise. The investments your organization has made in “integration” over the years were necessary as the organization and the IT infrastructure grew, but the Integration Infrastructure (i2) has likely been considered a necessary evil by senior management. That investment can now be leveraged in two important, new ways.
Published November 9, 2021
Complex enterprises have an integration infrastructure (i2) layer that connects technologies and applications across cloud, data center, virtualized systems, mainframe, edge computing, etc.
Integration Infrastructure Management (i2M) is the “management” of the i2 layer and includes:
The i2 layer includes a core middleware application (such as IBM MQ) along with many other “integration” technologies, such as MFT (managed file transfer), IoT, REST APIs, DataPower Gateway, and other messaging technologies (i.e., Kafka, TIBCO EMS, IBM ACE, IBM Integration Bus (IIB) and more).
Published October 26, 2021
I heard on the news from the CDC that the COVID booster shot is now available. And being a responsible person who cares about the spread of this disease, I decided to sign-up for a shot. And that’s when I realized just how complex this event is for developers.
Published September 10, 2021
I don’t remember when, but sometime in the mid-90s, I was at a friend’s house in upstate New York and while browsing through the bookshelf came across an old worn-out copy of The Tao Te Ching by the Chinese philosopher and writer Lao-Tze.
Published August 31, 2021
Information Technology (IT) has moved through many clearly defined eras. I don’t feel the need to list them all, but the latest one clearly is the move from discrete computers to virtualized software-configured environments, that we all colloquially call “the cloud”.
Published August 30, 2021
If your organization is frustrated with how long it takes to roll out new applications and updates, they are not alone. Speed-to-market is an obsession at many companies today (see call-out box below), so anything that restricts or slows it down is a problem.
Published August 24, 2021
Today’s decision-making is different than even a few years ago. More “data” is used, and the data inputs take several forms, including humans.
A big part of today’s strategy and decision-making at enterprise-class organizations are committees, made up of a company’s subject matter experts and relevant stakeholders for a critical company initiative. They may meet quarterly or as needed and the committee work is in addition to their “day job.”
In a recent survey of decision-makers and professionals working in, or overseeing, integration infrastructure (i2) architecture or operations at large enterprises, we found that these corporate priorities warranted having a committee:
Top Committees in 2021:
Upon further discussion with senior executives, we kept hearing that while all committees officially drove strategy and direction for their initiative, the named initiatives with both a committee and an attached budget to fund the initiative made progress much more quickly.
Published July 20, 2021
Your strategy is to move everything to software configured and cloud-connected existence. I can say this with absolute confidence because quite frankly this is everyone’s strategy in 2021.
With cloud thinking, every decision becomes an operational choice without the historical lags previously associated with massive capital changes.
Published July 20, 2021
The problems of the past did not go away, they just continue to grow in complexity as environments grow. There is a mathematical, formula that shows that as the number of sub-components grows then the number of interconnections that must be managed grow at an exponential or even geometric rate.
Published July 20, 2021
IT is changing at an ever-accelerating pace. Moores Law used to be the principle by which we considered the evolving performance/cost of computing, but today this seems to be less useful, instead, we need a model that considers how many layers of systems do we manage.
