Product Overview IBM App Connect Enterprise

IBM Product Briefing 

Easily connect applications (Apps), Connect (Integrate) data, build APIs and act on events.

IBM App Connect Enterprise (ACE) allows customers to instantly connect applications, data, legacy systems and modern technologies across all their environments. IBM ACE is the latest revision of an old favourite. You may be using an earlier version of the product under a different name.

Product names relevant to this briefing include IBM Integration, IBM Application Connect Enterprise (ACE), WebSphere Message Broker, IBM Integration Broker, MQ Series Integrator (MQSI).

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ACE supports a wide range of integration styles, from traditional service-oriented architectures to modern ones, such as APIs, micro-services, and events. App Connect provides a single integration platform for the entire business in a hybrid and multi-cloud environment.

• Virtualise access to data wherever it lives. Expose as APIs with embedded API management capabilities and first-class support for API Connect.
• Use the award-winning Designer experience and multiple tools and smart connectors to ensure rapid results, regardless of skillset.
• Choose the deployment options that suit your business, managed SaaS on IBM Cloud, software, and containerised deployment to public clouds.

Business Drivers

In this time of digital transformation, organisations are looking to reinvent themselves, open new channels to market, deliver new services, monetise data, and expand ecosystems for an enhanced user experience. But organisations are struggling to integrate, manage and secure the data and applications that are proliferating in this rapidly transforming environment. That is why Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) is one of the fastest growing segments in the hybrid integration market, with a CAGR of 22% according to Market Research Future Analysis. IBM firmly believes that the integration solution of the future must support hybrid user roles, hybrid connectivity and hybrid deployment.

IBM is an established vendor in the application integration space with its flagship IBM App Connect Enterprise offering with thousands of successful deployments. App Connect combines the capabilities of IIB along with a new web-based user experience for a powerful solution for integration needs. Only IBM provides a broad range of deployment options, a simple, award-winning tooling experience, comprehensive support for different styles of integration, and flexible pricing and licensing options.

Key Capabilities

The IBM Application Connect Enterprise (ACE) product delivers a huge number of key capabilities, including:

• Hundreds of pre–built smart connectors to SaaS and on-premises enterprise applications to leverage processes and data across applications, no matter where they reside.
• Intelligent configuration-based tooling to enable users to quickly connect data across environments.
• Ability to integrate apps and automate copying and synchronisation of data between on-premises and cloud-based applications without worrying about mismatched sources, formats and standards.
• Ability to recognise events and take appropriate action across your IT ecosystem in an automated fashion.
• Ability to access, transform and combine data across all enterprise applications, databases and systems to expose data assets as APIs.

IBM App Connect Enterprise features
Some features of IBM App Connect Enterprise have specific requirements, such as a specific mode of operation or the availability of an additional product, such as a database or access to IBM MQ. Additional terms and conditions also apply to the use of some IBM App Connect Enterprise features, including the requirement for other product licenses.

Use Cases

Building API. Deliver engaging customer experiences by connecting customer, product and other data from across multiple systems, then transforming it and exposing it as APIs.

Act on Events. Capture new events contextually and in near real-time. Build workflows to orchestrate the right follow-on actions, to immediately react to new events and provide an ideal customer experience even as needs shift.

Data Integration. Move data between traditional enterprise systems and newer cloud-based applications despite varying architectures and data schemes. Securely connect all endpoints, from databases to packaged apps.

Why would you be interested?

If you have useful data spread across more than one system or you store similar data on more than one system such as “customer contact details” then App Connect enterprise can be used to create a single view of the data or synchronise data across all systems. It is often used to expose APIs or REST services where the data comes from multiple systems. Event driven architectures including “Internet of things” use cases are also ideally suited to App Connect Enterprise.

If you are concerned about:

• Difficulty accessing data in different places and formats across the enterprise.
• Inability to build modern, cloud native solutions.
• Challenges expanding integration development outside core IT team.
• Hindrances to innovation, speed and agility.

LOB leaders

Making new data requirements available to end users as quickly as possible or changing existing data to a new format or structure for the latest Mobile Application is where IBM ACE excels.

IT and Cloud Managers

Operations managers and administrator will see the benefits of using a single integration engine that can run across most platforms in the cloud or on premise and will be able to cope with all your integration needs. This will reduce the technology footprint of your environment and simplify management and maintenance.

Integration Developers

Developers responsible for building integrations will be more productive using the low code development environment. If your solution needs some .Net or Java code to be reused or implemented then IBM ACE can run these within the runtime, although this is rarely necessary. Using the specialised connectors and “auto discovery tools” speeds up integration to known applications such as SAP.

App Developers

App developers can use this technology to stub out backend end points and concentrate on the App development, once the real integration becomes available they can then use exactly the same interface and work with a real data set.

• For a detailed introduction to the web user interface, see
  IBM App Connect Enterprise web user interface.
• For more information about working with App Connect Professional, see the
  IBM App Connect Professional documentation.
• For more information about working with App Connect on IBM Cloud, see the 
  IBM App Connect on IBM Cloud docs in the IBM Integration community on developerWorks
• For more information about deploying applications to your integration servers; see 
  Deploying integration solutions.
• The IBM App Connect Enterprise Toolkit is an integrated development environment and graphical user interface based on the Eclipse platform. IBM App Connect Enterprise Toolkit
• An integration server provides an isolated runtime environment for a set of deployed message flows and resources. Each integration server runs as a unique process in a separate address space. You can configure integration servers to be associated with an integration node, or to run independently of an integration node. Integration servers and integration nodes
• The IBM Integration API is a remote programming interface that your custom integration applications can use to control integration nodes and their resources. IBM Integration API
• The IBM App Connect Enterprise web user interface enables users to access integration server resources by using a web browser, and provides integration administrators with a method of administering those resources. IBM App Connect Enterprise web user interface
• The mode in which IBM App Connect Enterprise is running can affect the number of integration servers and message flows that you can deploy. See Restrictions that apply in each operation mode. 
• For a technical overview of integration servers, see Integration servers and integration nodes. 
• Different perspectives in the IBM App Connect Enterprise Toolkit are used to develop message flows, message model schema files, and other related resources; see IBM App Connect Enterprise Toolkit