This article is by Jacoby Thwaites, Founder of Sparkl. Sparkl is one of the companies joining us at Cisco Live Milan in the DevNet Zone. Will you be joining us as well?
The service-oriented architecture has had a good life, generously supported by its friend, the Enterprise Service Bus.
SMAC and iPaaS
Today, the ESB is morphing into the Integration Platform-as-a-Service, or iPaaS. To go with this, we have a great new acronym SMAC, meaning Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud.
Our ESB can sit in someone else's datacenter and we call that the cloud. Or it can sit in our datacenter, and we call that behind the firewall.
We replace ageing XML with youthful JSON, and creaky old SOAP with snappy REST.
Add a workflow GUI where you put actions in a sequence, and ... well, what's really changed?
Adapters, adapters
Um. Let's go way back to 1996 and look at the original message-oriented middleware solution: ActiveWorks. Its value proposition was adapters - the modules that connect many market-leading packages to the integration platform itself.
ActiveWorks is now part of Software AG's webMethods product. If you look at that or indeed any of today's crop of iPaaS from SnapLogic to IFTTT, the value proposition remains basically unchanged: adapters.
And SMAC? Well, that just means adapters for Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
You know what? The adapter problem was solved nearly two decades ago. It's time we moved on!
Agility and Optimisation
The key problems faced by enterprise are still about agility and optimisation, to which we must now add conduct risk - especially in complex sectors like financial services and pharma.
So far as fixing these real business problems goes, we're no further forward:
- Agility is killed by configuration explosion.
- Optimisation is blocked by the chasm between business logic and datacenter automation.
- Conduct risk arises from the resulting fractured management and reporting.
Sure, it's a good thing to put our ESB in the cloud and call it an iPaaS. But that doesn't deal with the big, unsolved issues. To do that, we need to kill configuration, bridge the chasm between logic and infrastructure and log them both the same.
Well, that's pretty much what SPARKL does. We don't replace your ESB or your iPaaS, we work with them to create a solution that fixes the big issues. That's why we're a great way to speed up your business.
Come joint us in the DevNet Zone during Cisco Live in Milan, January 2015
We're really excited by DevNet and the way it enables innovation in infrastructure and business solutions. We using VIRL to increase speed of development and iteration.
At Cisco Live Milan 2015 we're showing SPARKL as a tool to choreograph components like the brand new Cisco APIC-EM and the Cisco Identity Services Engine. We're also integrating our unique SPARKL tech into the great new Cisco CIP story for enterprise solutions.
So please make sure you drop by the DevNet area at Cisco Live Milan 2015, ask for SPARKL and take time out to talk!
