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Integration Technology Predictions and Priorities for 2022

By Michael Nixon, Vice President, SnapLogic

There has not been a more important time to peer into the future of the integration industry than now.

Fifteen years ago, SnapLogic pioneered the concept of cloud-native, event-driven integration architecture and in 2017, pioneered artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) assisted integration development as an in-product, SaaS experience. The result is ease-of-use like none other-for all skill levels, from basic to expert. SnapLogic has changed the way many companies around the world build integrations.

Even with technological advancements affecting change at companies, given these contemporary times, disruption to the lives of people due to the pandemic combined with necessity and the fight for survival have become the true agents for innovation and change. Looking toward 2022 and better days ahead in the future, we can project how the world of integration and IT will change. 

Prediction: The future of IT will move rapidly, with more urgency than ever before, toward automating the enterprise, end to end

Automation, already proven in other areas of the corporate world (think manufacturing and general process automation), is going through an upward trajectory with broader adoption and acceleration within the IT and business processing end of enterprises. Thus, enterprise automation is at the intersection where event-driven architectures and software, AI and machine learning, business process management, intelligent integration platform as a service (iPaaS), application and data integration, and low-code application development all meet.

Over the last few years, we've seen companies apply enterprise automation to intelligently integrate applications and flow data between those apps to create complete business processes across functions. This means complete business processes, such as ERP to CRM to Finance (e.g., quote-to-cash), with manual efforts significantly reduced or removed, thereby speeding up business results. The benefits directly translate to less effort from people and more productivity per person, two critical attributes when facing talent and staffing shortages, as we are seeing today across industries.

There's no question that enterprise automation will continue to have a major impact across companies of all sizes and across many industries. A company like SailPoint, for example, which produces identity management and access software, reduces its helpdesk workload by 30% because of enterprise automation. What will be different in 2022 is the sense of urgency. In 2022, enterprise automation elevates from being a component of digital transformation that will be implemented in due time, to a business transformation necessity that increases the chances of business survival.

Look at the speed at which the arrival of the Omicron variant of the COVID-19 virus has taken hold and has suddenly changed the outlook for when companies can expect to have remote workers return to the office. All indications are remote workforces, along with staffing challenges, are here to stay. Enterprise automation provides the intelligent and fast data and application integration tooling that allows companies to match the speed at which sudden changes could happen to their environments. It also obviates the need for hard to find, specialized development talent-this is a job booster.

Prediction: Advanced in-product AI/ML experiences that speed up integration development, for all

Think about how AI-assisted workflows operate today in the consumer world. Nearly all the major e-commerce websites, name your favorites, have recommendation engines that present product suggestions to you (based on your browsing history), right there on the webpage you're visiting. You don't have to go to a separate webpage to view product recommendations. Or, as you are typing a URL into your browser's address box, URL suggestions are presented to you (assuming you have the feature enabled) as you type each letter-just arrow right and accept.

In the business to business, development and IT worlds, there are a broad selection of AI/ML development tools and libraries to help data scientists and developers create AI/ML models for whatever use case that can be imagined. But the presence of AI/ML directly in the development tools that assist the integration development process is not as prevalent. For all the same reasons standalone AI/ML models are created-to learn a behavior, reduce repetitive tasks, predict an outcome, etc.-you want to have similar experiences within the integration development tool itself.

Others across the IT and integration industry are predicting this will begin to happen in 2022. However, my prediction is that what you'll start to see in 2022 is a separation of integration tools with advanced, in-product AI/ML assistance that obviates the need for specialized development talent (which is in short supply) compared to tools that are just starting out in this exciting space.

Consider the WD-40 Company; it does not have the luxury of a software development team, and many other companies are like them. Having an intelligent and automated app and data integration tool, driven by AI/ML assistance, means the WD-40 Company can staff their IT team with tech-savvy business school graduates straight out of college, with no programming experience. They have a point. Most studies detailing the breakdown of college majors indicate business majors account for ~20% of all majors, engineering majors ~5 to 6%, and computer science is ~4%. That's a 3:1 to 5:1 advantage for business majors, in terms of the number of graduating students. Let's take it further: as the competition for talent intensifies, more companies are foregoing a degree requirement, and may just require tech-savvy experience.

Prediction: Metadata will be the new ‘it' thing for IT

Thanks in very large part to a particular social media company making a major sea change to shift its strategic focus to its virtual-reality world creation, the term "meta" is now imprinted in the pop culture vernacular. This invariably creates an opportunity to cite the advantages of metadata, which is real-world base technology, typically with obscure, geek-level interest, that exists behind integration, IT, and database products. Metadata is generated as these products are being used and is core to creating very cool, highly customizable, product features and services.

In 2022, expect the benefits of metadata to be more front and center, and dare I say, hip, to talk about in technology and non-technology circles. Furthermore, there is a direct correlation between the amount of metadata generated, including the length of time metadata has been gathered, to the level of sophisticated and customizable services possible. Imagine, features, services, or AI/ML results tailored to the usage data within your specific environment, locally or globally. That's cool. The more metadata, the better.

Prediction: Flexible connectivity and easy-to-use integration become killer applications     

Use an application to integrate and build applications? Count on it.

From our own research and count, over 10,480 SaaS companies have been funded by venture capitalists over the last ten years. Other sources place the total number of SaaS companies at roughly 15,000 worldwide. IDC indicates that over 59 zettabytes of data are in production. Apple alone shipped nearly 197 million cell phones in just 2020. Between Android and iPhone, total, there are billions upon billions of active cell phones in the world. Now consider the thousands upon thousands of companies that must select from these SaaS tools and data sources to automate and perform the business processes previously mentioned.

Considering the number of permutations, in 2022 and beyond, there will not be one type of data platform that will meet all use cases, operational and analytical. From what we've seen, for every environment that wants to centralize into a single data warehouse or data platform, there are a few more that want to select among multiple data warehouses. For every environment that prefers to push data into a cloud data warehouse or data platform first, there's an environment that prefers to flow data directly between applications first and achieve at-the-speed of business operational efficiency. Flexibility and freedom to choose are the key.

Lastly, reinforcing the earlier point about the shortage of technical and development talent, from the time SnapLogic started and peering into 2022 and beyond, the trend we see is clicks, not code. Integration from within a data warehouse requires more scarce, hands-on SQL, Python, Scala, or Ruby-on-Rails scripting and data engineering skills. This is complicated for the majority of integration and automation use cases.

Stepping into 2022, the challenge is to produce easy-to-use integration and automation applications that approach cell phone useability, which will cater to business-oriented users. Within the same software environment, however, these should still enable IT or experts with the capable skills to go under the hood and customize and build the integration and automation application with greater degrees of granular control. As we heard from many of our customers at our virtual Enterprise Automation Summit Y:21 (EAS Y:21) in December, even when going deep, it is still preferred that the process is quick and easy and not laborious with code.

This is the long-term trend that will continue, well beyond 2022.  

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

As VP of product marketing, Michael leads outbound product marketing strategy, value development, promotion, and execution for SnapLogic's intelligent iPaaS solution. Prior to SnapLogic, Michael was senior director of product marketing and competitive intelligence for Snowflake over a number of years. Originally an electronics design engineer, Michael holds a Bachelor of Science, Electronic Engineering Technology, from the University of Nebraska and an M.B.A. from the University of Dallas, Texas.