Throughout the history of the IT industry, integration has been an important part of most projects. Whether it is integration of transactions, data, or processes, each has challenges and associated patterns and antipatterns. In an age of mobile devices, social networks, and cloud services, and big data analytics, integration is more important than ever, but the scope of the challenge for IT projects has changed. Partner APIs, social networks, physical sensors and devices, all of these and more are important sources of capability or insight. It is no longer sufficient to integrate resources under control of the enterprise, because many important resources are in the ecosystem beyond enterprise boundaries. With this as the basic tenet, we address these questions: What are the current integration patterns that help enterprises become and remain competitive? How do you choose when to use which pattern? What is the topology for a "composable business"? And how do you accelerate the process of implementation through intelligent choice of supporting integration middleware? This IBM® Redbooks® publication guides integration practitioners and architects in choosing integration patterns and technologies.

The organization pursuing digital transformation must embrace new ways to use and deploy integration technologies, so they can move quickly in a manner appropriate to the goals of multicloud, decentralization, and microservices. The integration layer must transform to allow organizations to move boldly in building new customer experiences, rather than forcing models for architecture and development that pull away from maximizing the organization's productivity. Many organizations have started embracing agile application techniques, such as microservice architecture, and are now seeing the benefits of that shift. This approach complements and accelerates an enterprise's API strategy. Businesses should also seek to use this approach to modernize their existing integration and messaging infrastructure to achieve more effective ways to manage and operate their integration services in their private or public cloud. This IBM® Redbooks® publication explores the merits of what we refer to as agile integration; a container-based, decentralized, and microservice-aligned approach for integration solutions that meets the demands of agility, scalability, and resilience required by digital transformation. It also discusses how the IBM Cloud Pak for Integration marks a significant leap forward in integration technology by embracing both a cloud-native approach and container technology to achieve the goals of agile integration. The target audiences for this book are cloud integration architects, IT specialists, and application developers.

In order to remain competitive in today's world, companies need to be able to integrate internally and externally by connecting sensors, customers and partners with the information in their systems of record. In short, they need to integrate with everything. This IBM® Redbooks® publication describes how IBM Application Integration Suite and IBM Messaging portfolio can be used to satisfy the needs of core hybrid integration use cases, accelerating companies in their digital transformation journey. All concepts are explained within the context of these use cases: Joining the API economy Improving productivity Refactoring for innovation The target audience for this book is cloud and integration architects and specialists who are implementing hybrid integration solutions.

This IBM® Redbooks® publication gives a broad understanding of IBM IMSTM integration and connectivity solutions to access applications and data stores across your enterprise architecture. As an application developer, architect, systems integrator, or systems programmer, there is important information that is available in this book that pertains to your responsibilities to continue to include the proven performance, data integrity, and workload distribution that is available from IMS in to selected projects that are related to your entire enterprise. This book updates and adds to the information in the following IBM Redbooks publications: IMS e-business Connectors: A Guide to IMS Connectivity, SG24-6514 IMS Connectivity in an On Demand Environment: A Practical Guide to IMS Connectivity, SG24-6794 Powering SOA Solutions with IMS, SG24-7662 IBM IMS Version 12 Technical Overview, SG24-7972 IMS 12: The IMS Catalog, REDP-4812 Rethink Your Mainframe Applications: Reasons and Approaches for Extension, Transformation, and Growth, REDP-4938

Business-to-business (B2B) integration is a buzzword which has been used a lot in recent years, with a variety of meanings. Starting with a clear technical definition of this term and its relation to topics like A2A (Application-to-Application), ASP (Application Service Provider), A2A, and B2C (Business-to-Consumer), Christoph Bussler outlines a complete and consistent B2B integration architecture based on a coherent conceptual model. He shows that B2B integration not only requires the exchange of business events between distributed trading partners across networks like the Internet, but also demands back-end application integration within business processes, and thus goes far beyond traditional approaches to enterprise application integration approaches. His detailed presentation describes how B2B integration standards like RosettaNet or SWIFT, the application integration standard J2EE Connector Architecture and basic standards like XML act together in order to enable business process integration. The book is the first of its kind that discusses B2B concepts and architectures independent of specific and short-term industrial or academic approaches and thus provides solid and long-lasting knowledge for researchers, students, and professionals interested in the field of B2B integration.

Today, organizations are responding to market demands and regulatory requirements faster than ever by extending their applications and data to new digital applications. This drive to deliver new functions at speed has paved the way for a huge growth in cloud-native applications, hosted in both public and private cloud infrastructures. Leading organizations are now exploiting the best of both worlds by combining their traditional enterprise IT with cloud. This hybrid cloud approach places new requirements on the integration architectures needed to bring these two worlds together. One of the largest providers of application logic and data services in enterprises today is IBM Z, making it a critical service provider in a hybrid cloud architecture. The primary goal of this IBM Redpaper publication is to help IT architects choose between the different application integration architectures that can be used for hybrid integration with IBM Z, including REST APIs, messaging, and event streams.

Dealing with the concepts behind a vendor's products, this a guide for IT managers on how to ensure the IT infrastructure matches the need of the enterprise, and which procedures should be followed to ensure this happens.

In the realm of application integration we see one hype after the other. The message broker was succeeded by the service bus and service oriented architecture, today it is microservices and API's. The advocates of these technologies promise a great deal, but in reality most implementations fail to deliver. Are these technologies flawed? No, it is not the technology that creates a flawed implementation, it is the people using the technology who design flawed implementations. Vendors of integration tooling and programmers have published an extraordinary amount of information on the technical aspects of application integration. Unfortunately, there is remarkably little guidance on how to design successful application integration solutions. This is largely caused by the outdated view that application integration is nothing more than sharing data between applications. The premise of this eBook is that application integration is about how to support your business processes across a network of well-integrated heterogeneous applications. By exploring integration architecture and its relation with enterprise architecture this eBook provides guidance on how to design successful application integration solutions regardless of underlying technology.

Across numerous vertical industries, enterprises are challenged to improve processing efficiency as transactions flow from their business communities to their internal systems and vice versa, simplify management and expansion of the external communities, accommodate customer and supplier preferences, govern the flow of information, enforce policy and standards, and protect sensitive information. Throughout this process, external partners must be on-boarded and off-boarded, information must flow across multiple communications infrastructures, and data must be mapped and transformed for consumption across multiple applications. Some transactions require synchronous or real-time processing while others are of a more periodic nature. For some classes of customer or supplier, the enterprise might prefer a locally-managed, on-premise solution. For some types of communities (often small businesses), an as-a-Service solution might be the best option. Many large enterprises combine the on-premise and as-a-Service approach to serve different categories of business partners (customers or suppliers). This IBM® Redbooks® publication focuses on solutions for end-to-end integration in complex value chains and presents several end-to-end common integration scenarios with IBM Sterling and IBM WebSphere® portfolios. We believe that this publication will be a reference for IT Specialists and IT Architects implementing an integration solution architecture involving IBM Sterling and IBM WebSphere portfolios.