The Super iPaaS: A revolution in AI-enabled, enterprise integration

AI has gone from promise to present in an instant—challenging assumptions and sending businesses scrambling. A world of opportunities has opened for those ready to act. But for everyone else, a serious reckoning is coming.

That’s because while AI is rapidly creating opportunities, it’s also accelerating huge risks—faster, and more deeply than any disruption to date. It’s only been 10 months since ChatGPT exploded onto the market. Easy access to Generative AI requires new focus, a shift in thinking, and action. There’s no debate we are experiencing a generational shift in IT: one of those moments that crystallizes IT priorities and sharpens company focus. It’s as big as the arrival of cloud computing, or (looking further back) client-server computing or the proliferation of mobile devices.

The potential to fuel innovation, business insight, worker efficiency, and proactive approaches has Boards of Directors and CEOs pouring money into AI initiatives, driving expectations of change. And those expectations are high: PWC predicts AI will account for $15.7 trillion of the global economy in less than ten years. IT visionaries see the potential for Gen AI to drive business outcomes—as workflows shift from systems of record—to be more automated, more predictive, help business leaders be proactive and preventative, and ultimately have the kind of situational awareness that delivers insight and decision power into the hands of business leaders in the moment.

While all this—generating mass personalization, automation and super visibility—will be fueled by GenAI, it is integration that will remain the connective tissue that enables digitization to transform at machine scale.

The excitement around AI carries with it expectations on IT leaders to deliver. And with all that demand also comes risk. AI brings along a series of worries for CIOs, CDOs and CSOs. Citizen developers empowered with generative AI are writing and deploying code into the enterprise as business units seek to drive innovation at an increasing pace to meet customer expectations. GenAI will exponentially increase the complexity of the integration that holds an enterprise together. How? By adding to existing connectivity chaos and piling on top of mounting technical debt while introducing justifiable concerns about privacy, security, resiliency, and compliance up and down the IT stack. Those responsible for the enterprise IT environment fear they are falling further and further behind while others in the organization jump headlong into exciting new territory.

Chaos and complexity in the age of AI

In a way, this isn’t entirely new. Enterprise integration has always been growing more complex. From the cloud, to the global pandemic, to increasing regulation around data sovereignty. But the recent proliferation of AI has added a new layer of risk, accelerating the chaos. When you think about how leveraging AI depends on massive amounts of data, while also creating new data all the time, spanning the globe, and creating new use cases, it’s no wonder that we’re primed for an enterprise integration meltdown.

The AI paradox

Ironically, AI is both the threat and the solution. Its use is adding complexity to the enterprise integration landscape—while potentially providing the power to simplify it. Adopted right, and right away, AI can empower business technology (BizTech) users to self-serve without creating more IT backlogs and making IT the bottleneck for innovation (more on that later in this guide). Adopted in the wrong way, and you’re mired in duplication, blind security risks, and insurmountable chaos.

In what feels like the blink of an eye we’ve watched CIOs, CDOs, and CSOs fall further and further behind. But this is only the beginning.

You’re probably fighting a losing struggle against:

• Adhering to data sovereignty laws when you don’t even know exactly how your data is being transmitted and to whom. The EU’s GDPR was just the first of many sweeping data laws - a trend that we see continuing around the globe. Add in the black-box architecture and break-things-fast philosophy of AI—and your business may break more regulations than it can afford before you’ve had your second cup of coffee.
• Maintaining security in complex environments, where private and public clouds must be integrated for a fluid flow of data. APIs keep shooting up like mushrooms after a spring rain, and the latest dev trends means importing modules to get the job done fast rather than right. Oh yeah, and you can’t even fill the senior security roles you need just to hold the status quo. Things are looking scary.
• Tracking processes and transactions that cross multiple regions and ensuring their reliability so that your business is winning, not losing, users or customers. Maybe you’ve pulled out of whole regions, just to maintain simplicity—a short-sighted approach that can put you permanently behind.
• Figuring out which of your business users have hopped on the AI-train on their own—without any signs of implementing proper governance. It’s the wild west out there, and everyone is scrambling to figure out generative AI. What does it feel like when you don’t know if your critical data, strategies, and reports, are being fed to unsecured AI plugins by those who don’t understand AI in the first place?

You’re struggling with these things because you've inherited systems that are impossible to replace, created core applications that run the business and can't go down, scrambled to adapt to every change in strategy (and every new region or security crisis or data regulation) with more code, more clouds, and more controls. Where does that leave you? With an organization that feels "too big to innovate."

A new Super iPaaS vision to navigate the chaos

In this landscape, it is impossible for current integration solutions to meet the challenges leaders face. Many of the iPaaS solutions are limited—whether to cloud-only, or they can’t scale, or can’t tap into mainframe data, or, or, or (it’s a long list—and barely even takes into account the AI revolution). To truly shift the dynamic from “connectivity” to a future-focused, business-outcome-led approach, a new category of integration is required. We call this category “Super iPaaS.”

Introducing Super iPaaS, a unified, AI-enabled, enterprise integration platform that transcends geographies, clouds, hybrid environments, integration patterns, and more. It’s a new type of solution altogether that doesn’t just integrate your applications—it integrates your entire enterprise.

Super iPaaS means enabling hybrid integration, connecting disparate datasets, and allowing historical data to be combined with real-time workflows in the convergence of app and data integration. It addresses security, compliance, and privacy, is intuitive for business stakeholders while powerful enough to please IT, and lets your business take a proactive stance to deliver agility, productivity, and governance. With a Super iPaaS you can use AI to help control the chaos, rather than spread it. Easily, securely, and on a single unified platform.

What separates a Super iPaaS from a traditional iPaaS?

The traditional iPaaS has severe limitations. It either sacrifices power and robustness for ease-of-use by citizen integrators or requires highly specialized IT experts to develop, deploy, and maintain.

To address these weaknesses, we’ve seen organizations adding multiple, often disparate, integration tools -- and duplicating integrations across them. As a result, those enterprises end up needing more resources, adding more complexities, and dealing with more security, privacy, regulatory, and resiliency risks. This approach just adds to the chaos and adds more problems rather than being a solution.

To be a Super iPaaS, your solution needs to include:

• Integrate Applications, Data and B2B with APIs and Events
• Provide cloud-first enterprise, end-to-end hybrid integration
• Meet global needs for data sovereignty laws, with central management to assure governance
• Have a common user-interface across all parts of the platform
• Leverage the power of generative AI to drive productivity and agility

Done right, with all these five requirements at the core, true Super iPaaS solutions can deliver on the promises of more autonomous, predictive and transparent enterprise. What does this mean for the enterprise? An AI-enabled enterprise integration platform provides hybrid integration (mainframe to cloud); connects disparate data sets; addresses security, compliance and privacy; is intuitive for business stakeholders; enables the business to be proactive; and delivers the payoff for AI investments on top of a fully integrated environment.

Integration in three words: Agility. Productivity. Governance.

A Super iPaaS isn't just a collection of components. It’s a new way to orchestrate your business. It enables you to work faster, get more done, and tame the chaos. It’s a way to elevate all the individual workflows and actions everyone does across the enterprise todeliver better experiences for your customers, partners, and employees. A Super iPaaS empowers you to do that through agility, productivity, and governance.

So what does work life look like with a Super iPaaS in place?

Agility: You become agile

The Super iPaaS will help you sell more umbrellas. You see, a campaign manager on your marketing team in London can take purchase data from Snowflake and compare it to seasonal weather trends. And then create an automation that connects your CRM to Open Weather data to send a personalized promo offer to your most loyal customers 30 minutes before a rainstorm. Then the teams in Seattle, Mumbai, Wellington and Vancouver all start using the same integration, all in just one click. Umbrella sales, through the roof.

Productivity: You become seriously productive

The Super iPaaS will help your IT team become the life of the party. For instance, the CEO of your travel company has big ambitions. He has lots of grand ideas about being listed in (and learning from) every travel search result around the world. But to work with thousands of travel companies in dozens of countries creates an application and data labyrinth. It’s usually IT’s job to point out what isn’t possible or to temper expectations. But with a Super iPaaS, IT can just say yes, and bring grand ideas to life. Guess who’s getting toasted at the next company off-site?

Governance: You can oversee everything

The Super iPaaS means you can recall 10 products—instead of 10,000. You see, the pharma company you work for learned from a supplier that a shipment was contaminated. That’s bad news. But it’s not all bad! Luckily you know where every product from this vendor is in the supply chain, what has already hit shelves, and what is sitting on a shelf in a warehouse in Tacoma. (All thanks to a Super iPaaS that connects everything.) And then—you can onboard new suppliers in a flash to pump up production so supply doesn’t suffer.

Not anyone can claim to offer a Super iPaaS. To be a Super iPaaS solution, it not only has to have all five of the “must-have components” it must also enable a more autonomous, predictive, transparent, and truly integrated enterprise.

Super iPaaS will allow you to:
 

• Develop your integrations anywhere and deploy anywhere with the ability to reuse instead of rebuilding.
• Run anywhere without needing to move data across your distributed integrations, APIs, and data pipelines, providing end-to-end, “single pane of glass” visibility across transactions.
• Work in a unified integration platform with a broad set of capabilities and a centralized UI which simplifies learning, management, and collaboration with integrated support for APIs with apps and data to enable rapid cloud adoption.
• Have a “single pane of glass” across your distributed integrations, APIs, and data pipelines with end-to-end visibility across transactions and a unified experience for all iPaaS components to streamline observability and simplify compliance.
• Empower Gen-AI enabled integration that allows business technologists to quickly create integrations by automating workflows from description to deployment.

Together these benefits will enable a data-driven business and set the necessary foundation for you to keep up with the pace of innovation and deliver on the demands of the business.

The world’s first—and only—Super iPaaS is available now thanks to Software AG. A unified platform, our Super iPaaS solution will help you create fully connected experiences for your customers, employees, and partners. It is the only enterprise-grade platform that integrates anything, anywhere—any way you want.

Chaos to control

Instead of integration chaos, you can have a single integration platform that can be used by anyone across your enterprise, while still retaining central management and end-to-end visibility. From chaos to control means rapid adaptation to your technology needs, quicker answers to business requests, and total control over every integration across your business.

What's more, our sophisticated and extensive collection of connectors (some even AI-generated) and advanced API management tools let you take a futureproof approach to leverage your existing infrastructure today. And then transition to the cloud when the time is right.

Integrating your applications, data, and B2B partners with APIs and events has never been so straight-forward, more accessible to a full range of users, or secure. Now, with a natural language or low-code UI for BizTech users, and a UI for IT specialists in the same integration product, you’ll drive productivity and agility like never before, while simultaneously giving collaboration and governance the critical boosts they have probably needed for a long time.

Software AG’s Super iPaaS solution is here today. Ready to get started.

Today’s integration solutions cannot rise to the challenges you are facing in this new world—a new category of solutions is needed. One that will allow all of you to say "yes" to innovation and its rewards...without being threatened with new complexity and risk. Start with the leader of leaders in the enterprise integration space, and join us on the journey to an entirely new category of integration.

An AI-enabled enterprise integration platform provides hybrid integration from mainframe to cloud; connects disparate data sets; addresses security, compliance and privacy; is intuitive for business stakeholders; enables the business to be proactive; and delivers the payoff for AI investments on top of a fully integrated environment.

The AI-enabled revolution in total enterprise integration is here. Embrace the future, cut through the integration chaos—and set the standard in your industry. Today.