By Laurent Chatelanat, CEO and Founder of Olympe.io
Tech leaders looking to transform their enterprise IT would strongly prefer not to have to trash their legacy infrastructure but rather to build upon it. That’s what a composition platform allows us to do. How does it do that? Through the 3rd pillar of composition platforms, which I call Integration.
The Composition Platform is like a Lego set where an enterprise can assemble bricks of business capabilities, such as live temperature readings from IoT sensorsembedded in a container of sensitive pharmaceuticals, into complete business solutions.
The 5 main pillars of a best-of-breed composition platform are
The Integration pillar is a powerful mechanism allows us to reuse legacy services and custom business capabilities quickly, flexibly, and with agility.
Integration in a composition platform involves encapsulating the capability to use data and services from both the enterprise and any external party such as hyperscalers. In turn, the the data/service provided by that encapsulated connector can then be called, both by applications composed within the platform and to the outside world via APIs or a local datacloud implementation.
The composition platform must be able to integrate any level of API, from the embedded system and drivers to webservices and API management platforms, to meet as many of the business needs of the enterprise as possible. This is more feasible than many realize: any JavaScript library can be integrated by using its built-in features and standard technologies.
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Besides a marketplace with existing reusable connectors (which I covered a couple of articles ago), the platform must offer a way to enrich the marketplace with connector bricks for the business’ specific needs. This is what I call the Development pillar, and I’ll talk about it more in future articles.
Once integration is done, access to all the integrated systems should be available transparently to any composition running on any device. This needs to be done through A dataflow-oriented technology composed of multiple microservices sharing a common data environment.
Integration in a composition platform is about wrapping a connector to an external service or data source to make it available in the entire platform transparently.
The ability to integrate any external data source or service provides enormous flexibility to adapt the enterprise’s infrastructure. It allows companies to save costs by capitalizing on what already works, customize what more they may need, and overall execute their digital transformation faster and with more peace of mind.
Keep an eye on the Olympe.io profile for my upcoming articles in the Composition Platform series.
