Innovation requires a hybrid future with an iPaaS strategy

Successfully leveraging integration, APIs, events and data is essential to the next paradigm shift from digital transformation to AI transformation​. While there are different ways to approach integration and automation, all roads lead to an integration platform as a service (iPaaS). In fact, iPaaS has been growing rapidly for years and is showing no signs of slowing down.

Meanwhile, integration of necessary apps, systems and data is a moving target. The only constant is change, as applications are replaced and modernized to cloud. In addition, IDC predicts that there will be 1 billion new logical apps in existence by 2028, driven in part by AI. These reasons underpin our huge investment in the iPaaS market.

At a time of such opportunity and innovation in the market, we are bringing together leading technologies from the IBM® and webMethods integration portfolios. Through our investments and inventions, we are intent on helping business leaders turn integration into a competitive advantage.

Leveraging expertise for a unified hybrid future

We believe iPaaS must be hybrid, seamlessly handling deployments across clouds and on prem. It must also be unified, bringing together multiple integration patterns with shared control, governance and portability. We are leveraging our combined expertise in hybrid, multicloud integration to empower our clients to achieve higher productivity for every persona and team that touches integration across their organizations. Done right, iPaaS manages complexity so organizations can thrive.

With hybrid control at the core, we bring together integration patterns (such as applications, APIs, B2B, files, events, messaging and more) into a common experience via a unified control plane. Central control with distributed execution means that your entire integration landscape can be managed via a single pane of glass, across all geographies, hybrid multicloud hosting environments, user personas and teams. A unified iPaaS delivers the most comprehensive platform to handle whatever use case you can throw at it.

Driving iPaaS innovation with AI-powered solutions

What's more, with IBM's market-leading position in responsible AI, powered by watsonx™, we have the advantage to deliver AI-powered integration solutions that are unmatched in the iPaaS space. Building upon current product AI capabilities, generative AI can play a role throughout the entire integration lifecycle, driving productivity and agility across authoring, monitoring and governance for rapid innovation. AI assistants are a great starting point, and we're now charting a course leveraging AI agent-led hybrid iPaaS.

As this vision comes to life, hybrid iPaaS has the potential to:

• Align apps, data, APIs, B2B, files and event streams integration into a unified integration platform, eliminating islands of integration
• Simplify integration across the enterprise with a hybrid approach that spans mainframes to multicloud environments
• Help ensure security and data sovereignty via distributed execution runtimes with centralized control
• Fuel productivity and agility by improving speed of common integration tasks with Generative AI throughout the integration lifecycle, empowering diverse users building solutions for their organizations
• Leverage composable business architecture to modernize applications, with APIs and events
• Accelerate the development process, reduce costs and improve access to data by providing a global catalog that enables reuse and self-service access to existing integrations

It's a bold vision, and we're moving fast. This market, this team and this tech are coming together to create something truly powerful.

Our request to you? Don't lock yourself into another iPaaS without learning more. We know where iPaaS is going, and we invite you to come with us.