Thinking outside the factory

At Sage, our view is that you simply can't ignore enterprise application integration," says Mark Spencelayh, head of R&D at the FTSE 100-listed developer of ERP, accounting, payroll and human resources software. "For manufacturers, there are just too many compelling use cases – ranging from specialist legacy systems, to modern-day business intelligence systems." And the good news, he stresses, is that delivering that integration – especially in the case of Sage's traditional manufacturing industry heartland, the small and medium-sized companies that make up the bulk of British manufacturing businesses – has never been easier. In short, he explains, the arrival of cloud-based computing has had a huge impact – and one which looks set to continue. The bottom line? Integration, he enthuses, is easier than ever, cheaper than ever, more robust than ever, and more viable than ever. "Even two or three years ago, integration was something that was often associated with much larger manufacturers, who had the budgets and IT skills to do it," he says. "For smaller manufacturers, integration often meant simple one-way file transfers, or very limited integration – or just doing without. It was simply too costly, absorbed too many resources, and took too long to deliver." So what has happened to change this state of affairs? Spencelayh's colleague Mike Goodwin, principal technical architect at Sage, points to the coming together of several separate trends and developments. Simply put, says Goodwin, even as the underlying integration technologies have evolved to make integration easier, cloud providers have responded by embedding better service bus and workflow technologies within their offerings. And software vendors, too, have responded to the new paradigm: Sage itself, he notes, provides APIs that offer powerful integration with a wide range of legacy systems. The result? The differences that once existed between on-premise and cloud-based approaches to integration have become blurred. "The bottom line is that, going forward, manufacturers have more choices, better choices, and far more flexible choices than they had even a couple of years ago," he says. "As a result, they can mix-and-match their approach to integration – doing some of it via the cloud and some of it on-premise. The distinction between the two is disappearing and, from an IT management perspective, it is a distinction that matters less and less." Take, for instance, developments at the middleware level. Even a year ago, says Goodwin, the difference between on-premise middleware and cloud-based middleware was marked, even when the two were delivering similar functionality. On-premise, Microsoft offered Windows Server AppFabric, a set of integrated technologies that made it easier to build, scale and manage web-based and composite applications. For the cloud, there was Windows Azure AppFrabric, another bundle of technologies aimed at delivering much the same thing, but from a cloud-based perspective. But the two shared little in common, says Goodwin. From a software vendor's perspective, that meant developing two very different APIs, together with their ongoing support, documentation and training. And from the manufacturer's perspective, it meant getting to grips with two distinct sets of technologies, if they wanted to enjoy the flexibility of having both on-premise and cloud-based integration. Twelve months on, a sea change has taken place, says Goodwin. The two are not yet identical, to be sure, "but they're much closer than they were, with very marked similarities in areas such as caching, for instance". Similarly, he notes, vendors of cloud-based services – Microsoft itself, of course, with Azure, but also Google and Amazon, in the shape of Amazon Web Services – have invested heavily in embedding service bus and workflow technologies into their offerings, providing process automation, secure messaging and relay capabilities that support multiple messaging protocols, in order for applications to better communicate with each other, irrespective of location or device platform. What's more, adds Spencelayh, the affordability of cloud-based offerings renders these capabilities accessible at exceptionally low cost. "The cost of entry has reduced significantly in recent years," he notes. "Forget lengthy cost justifications and long-term commitments: the cloud is affordable, flexible and scalable. And cloud vendors' offerings continue to improve, further increasing the amount of clear blue water between the cloud and dedicated on-premise infrastructure." So if enterprise application integration has never been more affordable, flexible and powerful, what are the implications of this? Significantly, Spencelayh and Goodwin see three broad trends taking shape. First, the adoption of cloud-based integration will become more ubiquitous, further stimulating the degree of convergence between on-premise solutions and the cloud. "The move to the cloud is happening unevenly, with different industries and different sizes of business moving at different paces," says Spencelayh. "The sooner that we get to parity, the more that manufacturers will realise that they have a genuine choice, and that the cloud has truly arrived." Second, he adds, software vendors will increasingly write for both paradigms, given the fast-disappearing distinctions between them. Sage, in short, recognises that it is at the forefront of the movement to the cloud, but acknowledges that smaller vendors – and vendors of niche applications – will see the same logic. "Our view is that it's all about customer choice," he notes. "We aim to deliver similar choices on the two technology stacks, and leave it up to individual customers – and individual customers' budgets – to determine the direction of travel. In that sense, we aim to be completely agnostic." And third, explains Goodwin, there's a growing sense of the opportunity posed by what's coming to be termed 'hybrid cloud'. In short, manufacturers can cost-effectively achieve enterprise application integration in circumstances where the costs and difficulties of a purely on-premise solution would have been prohibitive. Now, manufacturers can mix and match as they choose, going for whichever alternative best meets their requirements in terms of speed, cost or performance. "You've only got to look at what has been happening in the world of business intelligence over the last couple of years to see the potential," he points out. "Previously, a business intelligence proposal would have been met with a traditional 'requirements capture' exercise, a feasibility study and a cost-justification. And by the time the sought-for integration and subsequent business intelligence analysis was delivered, it would probably have been out of date, overtaken by events." What's more, he adds, the low costs and ease of this emerging integration paradigm make it possible to build links to applications that would previously – if erroneously – have been seen as too trivial. "There are still plenty of factories where spreadsheets are the planning tool of choice, but populating those spreadsheets with data is a challenge," he says. "Now, it needn't be that way: integrating with a spreadsheet can be straightforward and inexpensive." In summary, observes Spencelayh, the traditional view of enterprise application integration must be discarded. "The same code – or almost the same code – can work on-premise or in the cloud. Manufacturers haven't fully woken up to that yet – when they do, an awful lot of things are going to change."