Technical Solutions Used For Application and Data Integration

The following article originally appeared in DZone's Integration Zone.

Open Source was mentioned most frequently, though others were mentioned as well.

To gather insights on the state of application and data integration, we spoke with 18 executives from 15 companies who are involved in the integration of applications and data.

Here’s who we talked to:

Shawn Ryan, V.P. Marketing Digital as a Service, Axway | Kurt Collins, Director of Technology Evangelism and Partnership, Built.io | Thomas Hooker, V.P. of Marketing, CollabNet | Piyush Mehta, CEO, Data Dynamics | Daniel Graves, VP of Product Management, Delphix | Samer Fallouh, V.P. of Engineering, and Andrew Turner, Senior Solutions Engineer, Dialexa | Andrew Leigh, V.P. of Marketing and Alliances, Jitterbit | Trevor Hellebuyck, CTO, Metalogix | Mike Stowe, Developer Relations Manager, MuleSoft | Zeev Avidan, V.P. Product Management, Open Legacy | Sean Bowen, CEO, Gordon McKinney, Senior Solution Architect, Ross Garrett, Product Marketing, Push Technology | Joan Wrabetz, CTO, Quali | Razi Sharir, V.P. of Products, Robin Systems | Girish Pancha, CEO, StreamSets | Bob Brodie, CTO, SUMOHeavy |

And here’s what they told us when we asked them, "What are the technical solutions you use to integrate applications and data?"

• A lot of proprietary with some Open Source. We use Swagger for publishing and Spring and Jax RS RESTful APIs for Java.
• A lot is home grown. SaaS-based offering on top of Azure has a lot of components, repositories, and containers. The Microsoft ecosystem for standards development enables users to go find Node and Angular JS developers that can come up to speed quickly.
• We build our solution on top of JSON and REST focusing on building an interface that allows customers to build an integration when, where and how they want to. Enable enterprises to stay nimble with MongoDB, NodeJS, our own back-end as a service, and React JS. JavaScript has seen a major growth spurt as it’s being used on both the frontend and backend – throughout the stack.
• We mix and match Open Source, microservices, and REST APIs modeling data. We have a proprietary way of tracking data as it proceeds from computing to networks to storage ensuring security of the data throughout the process.
• Segment is easy to get up and running for instant results – it integrates in minutes. If the data is mapped correctly, you can push it out in a couple of days. For more complex ecommerce retailers, we recommend Snowplow analytics for capturing event data, pipeline, page views, services from IoT, tracking, and web hooks. Stages collecting, enriching, modeling, and analyzing using Looker or Tableau. Back ends are easy to use. We are looking at Rethink DD for JSON stores where sharding is an issue. This stores data in a flat format which is great for real-time games, scoreboards, and analysis.
• HP, Ikanalm, Microsoft, OpenMake, Replay Solutions, Source IQ, Tasktop, Terramark, and UrbanCode.
• No one in this day and age is 100% proprietary. We run in six different AWS global centers to scale, perform, store, and replicate. We use Open Source capabilities that are high in quality and security. The market moves too fast to rely on a single solution.
• We use a documentation-first approach (API Blueprint + Apiary). API documentation testing ensures your API matches your documentation (Dredd). Background workers for heavy lifting or data processing. Queues and streams for passing data between systems. Caching to provide frequently accessed data.
• Ingesting into big data stores. Building an adaptable pipeline that will deal with the evolution of sources and destinations. Ability to compute KPIs as the data is flowing to ensure availability and fidelity.
• Our proprietary software connects upstream and downstream with different file types – including object based. We are vendor agnostic. We provide an API with connectivity upstream. Data is never at rest; it’s moving as needed. The customer needs to be able to manage, and see, the movement.
• Appcelerator and API management plus. NodeJS for API creation that’s scalable, an ecosystem for microservices, standardize on JavaScript.
• We use our own hybrid integration platform, Anypoint Platform, as well as RAML to simplify the integration of RESTful APIs.
• Our proprietary virtualization engine and masking engine.

What other solutions do you use for application and data integration?

Additional articles Tom has written for DZone on various IT topics and trends.