As time goes on, more and more tried and tested technologies and apps are migrating to the cloud. In the case of middleware and the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), this means the increasing deployment of iPaaS, or Integration Platform-as-a-Service.

I’ve also noticed a great new acronym SMAC - meaning Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud. In the context of the iPaaS, this is a fancy word that really just means adapters for Facebook, Twitter and the usual social technologies.

I think we’re observing useful re-workings of proven approaches, where the value proposition remains primarily about adapters. But I’m not sure we’re observing a fundamental change.

Adapters, Adapters

Let’s go way back to 1996 and look at the original message-oriented middleware solution: ActiveWorks. This was a really new piece of software at the time, and its value proposition was indeed adapters - the modules that connect market-leading packages to the integration platform and thus allow them to work together.

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.

So while I reckon the move to the cloud is good, I can’t help feeling that the adapter problem was really solved nearly two decades ago and it’s time we moved on.

Agility, Optimisation and Conduct Risk

I think two key business problems, especially in complex sectors like financial services and pharma, remain the well-known problems of agility and optimisation. Agility lets the business change fast; optimisation lets it change efficiently. I also think a third major area has come to the fore - conduct risk. This is most acute in heavily regulated industries such as banking.

So far as fixing these real business problems goes, we’re not much further forward:

  1. Agility is killed by the continuing configuration explosion.
  2. Optimisation remains blocked by the unbridged chasm between apps and datacenter operations.
  3. Conduct risk arises from fractured logging and exception reporting.

There’s a lot of benefit putting stuff in the cloud. But now everyone’s doing the same thing it’s harder to get differentiation and thus truly leap ahead of the competition. It’s more about keeping up.

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