Ramblings of an integration guy

Which partners are using my Sterling B2Bi? One of the problems we have in integration is knowing just which partners are using my services. Silly as this sounds it's a real problem. Over time customers come and go, services get replaced, customers  migrate to different services. Service Management API-Management knew this was a problem from the beginning - they have the in-built concept of managing who's using the APIs and you can, reasonably easily, deprecate APIs and track who is using them. However, the likes of IBM Sterling B2Bi do not have that concept. To find out whether a customer is currently  using a sterling hosted service requires some clever database searches which are deep in the bowels of the product. It's not alone in having this problem - many integration products have little partner usage visibility. They all take great care in onboarding customers but lose track of who's still using the services over time. Opsis usage tracking Opsis, Coliance's bu...

Helping your business department untangle the IT spaghetti This is a blog I wrote for the monitoring tool that I am writing for Coliance - called "Opsis". Your Purchasing system may run using security gateways, messaging systems, an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), an API Manager etc. Overlaying each individual piece of software is a layer of configuration that makes up the runtime for each specific business solution. i.e., security gateway policies, messaging systems queues, Enterprise Service Bus Flows, etc. When viewed like this, we can see that business solutions take ‘paths’ through ‘systems’. These paths are complex and vary depending on the business problem being solved. Sometimes, however, this is unattainable with your IT team kept busy monitoring whether machines are running, or if the software is generally operational. They spend much of their time examining individual artifacts on these systems such as queues and flows. Chances a...

In the May 2019 release of Mule they have included a new function called flow designer templates. These caught my eye as they are very similar to IBM’s APP Connect Designer flows and show how integration is becoming more accessible to the Line-of-Business.

One of IBM's best-known secrets is that they have two solutions that can act as API Management microgateways. This is a short post to highlight the various ways that you can expose APIs using IBM products and, in particular, the App Connect Enterprise (formerly IIB) Microgateway functionality.

Having worked in the MQ labs at IBM Hursley for many years I was always struck by how complex MQ appeared. As time has gone by little has changed my mind on this. Recently I was asked to create a solution for the customer that required repetitive creation of an MQ environment. We chose to create a tool using JSON as a configuration language. I'll describe the tool here and welcome feedback on it.

A lot of my customers are currently deciding which API Manager to use in their estate. With so many of them to choose from and a confusion of terminology this is not an easy task. I see RFP with long lists of criteria but I often think that the choice should be based on some other, softer, questions. I'll outline here some of how I help my customers choose which API Manager is right for them.