Why Upgrade Your WSO2 Enterprise Integrator?

Today, connecting various heterogeneous systems (or protocols) is key when developing complex integration solutions. Also, due to the wide range of deployment environments (i.e., on-premises, cloud, and container-based), this process becomes even more difficult. Enterprises seek software solutions that can handle any integration use case for a wide range of protocols (HTTP, AMQP, JMS, Kafka, gRPC), standards (OpenAPI, SOAP), databases, software as a service (SaaS) APIs (Salesforce, S3, SQS), and systems (File, SAP).

WSO2 Enterprise Integrator is an open-source, hybrid integration platform that supports API-centric integration scenarios in monolithic, cloud-based, and microservice-based deployment environments. The solution offers a wide range of mechanisms for either code-driven or graphical, drag-and-drop/configuration-driven integration. Also, it facilitates modern integration standards and requirements including file integration, data integration, streaming integration, and API/microservices integration. A number of customer success stories attest to the solution’s stability and usability.

In this post, we explore what’s next for WSO2’s integration solution!

Integration and API management for business growth

If you’ve been using WSO2 Enterprise Integrator solution, you are aware of the capabilities, features, and applications it can handle. The solution can help enterprises rapidly integrate heterogeneous services to build valuable digital services for their customers.

What are the next steps?

After carefully designing an integrated service, it should be exposed to consumers in a controlled manner. No matter how perfect the design is, if the final product is not managed properly, it can be misused by unauthorized users. And, if data or services are accessed without consent, it will negatively affect an enterprise’s brand value.

When it comes to exposing a service, it is necessary to pay attention to the key facts below.

• Define service level agreements (SLAs) for fair usage
• Offer the same service to multiple customers using different pricing plans
• Ensure security of the digital services
• Productize highly used services
• Manage the complete lifecycle of services (from inception to retirement)
• Version of services for continuous improvement
• Monitor the entire ecosystem of services to generate valuable business insights
• Scale based on demand

As all these aspects become critical for the betterment and stability of a digitally driven organization, it is clear that integration alone cannot handle all these aspects.

This is where API management comes into play. By using the right API management mechanism, businesses can expose services to a wide range of customers without worrying about the underlying complexities mentioned above. In any real-world business, customers and service providers have to negotiate using a business contract. This can be a verbal discussion or a well-structured agreement. This is the same for a digital business too.

In a digitized business world, an API can be considered as a contract. It acts as a contract between the service providers and consumers. This makes it easier to include an API as a digital agreement between a business and consumers. Services can be exposed through APIs so they can be easily accessed by the community.

That is the value of combining API management and integration.

Figure: Combining integration and API management

Upgrading from Enterprise Integrator to API Manager 4.0

The latest version of WSO2 API Manager is designed to facilitate both integration and API management requirements. Services created in enterprise integrator can be exposed and managed as APIs.

WSO2 API Manager integrates tightly with WSO2 Enterprise Integrator but remains loosely coupled to allow domain experts to use the systems that work best for them. Services created in WSO2 Enterprise Integrator can be published to our Service Catalog, where WSO2 API Manager will automatically discover them and list them as an available data sources for the creation of new APIs. This clean workflow keeps API management and enterprise integration concerns separate while combining their power to improve the efficiency of developing new API products.

The integration team can focus on building services from existing systems. And the API management team can focus on designing, publishing, and managing those services as APIs, which are consistent with the organization’s digital strategy. Developers can integrate corporate data into their applications to bring new products to market and better improve the customer experience, driving more revenue.

Once this upgrade is done in the setup, it is possible to have a fully functional, complete integration and API management solution that can future-proof your business!

A comprehensive list of features can be found in this link for further reading. Also, the official product documentation is designed to provide you with all the necessary information to get started with the latest solution. Please refer to it here.

Feel free to try out the latest version of WSO2 API Manager by clicking here. If you have any questions, let us know through this slack channel.