Are you stuck with business as usual where you end up building solutions with a platform as a service (PaaS) for project needs? Do you want to get out of always being reactive, creating further technical debt and never able to execute the vision of building rapid solutions that would end up being assets to your organization? This is my story of how I reduced IT costs and the increased project quality at a large beverage company.
Technology is important to enterprise success. However, the larger a company becomes, and the more technology projects it initiates, the more complexity and fragmentation arises in both business processes and the technology landscape. In order to deal with this difficult environment, companies often introduce rigorous management and control processes, but these can become overly rigid and calcify innovation and agility.
Previously, I wrote a blog post about IT Engineering here at MuleSoft and how we use MuleSoft products at MuleSoft. Inter-team communication is critical for us to complete projects and we decided to implement a Center for Enablement (C4E) approach internally. The MuleSoft customer success team offered to assist us in pursuing an evolved approach to developing MuleSoft applications for IT.
I’ve been an Integration Architect in IT engineering here at MuleSoft for about one and a half years. When I arrived, our group had a full queue of potential development projects, but were still maintaining many legacy and point-to-point applications created by external developers outside of IT. Each application was designed well and accomplished singular goals that satisfied the use cases from the business owners, but it’s been challenging to maintain these legacy applications within the context of our ever-evolving products.
Over the past few months, I have been working with our Product and Engineering team on Crowd, the latest release of Anypoint Platform. The Crowd release consists of updates to Anypoint Exchange as well as the new Anypoint Designer Center in Anypoint Platform.
In a previous post, I explained the reasons why pure SOA, despite being a powerful architectural paradigm with many benefits, could fall short. Building on that narrative, I will provide in this post guiding principles to help you create a modern integration strategy – one that enables digital transformation, supports the API economy and is suitable for the pace of change required to build an application network.