The Internet of Things (IoT) is being fueled by an explosion of endpoints and services coupled with a global transformation to digital business. This has created countless opportunities for innovative applications and services, as well as challenges in getting devices and applications to interact and communicate successfully.
Jitterbit fits in right in the middle of the IoT, and the company’s cloud-based Harmony platform is designed to meet the broad and disparate integration needs of the IoT. Erik Linask, TMC (News - Alert) group editorial director, got a chance to speak to Andrew Leigh, VP of marketing and alliances at Jitterbit, at the recent IoT Editors Day Santa Clara 2015 event about the need for modern middleware in today’s technology landscape.
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“If I’m the CIO or I’m the VP of marketing or sales, I’ve got more technology available to me than I ever had before,” said Leigh of the role of IoT in today’s business world. “Ninety percent of CIOs and businesses have a hybrid architecture.”
That hybrid architecture is the largest problem when it comes to getting devices, applications and data to effectively and efficiently integrate. And traditional middleware offerings are typically designed for legacy, server-oriented architectures and simply don’t work in today’s cloud and IoT-driven landscape, in which data needs to pass in and out of firewalls at a rapid pace.
“These things were never designed for the needs of communicating in and out of a firewall, let alone the real-time APIs that we’re starting to see today,” said Leigh of legacy middleware solutions, many of which were developed 12 to 15 years ago.
Jitterbit’s cloud-based platform offers a new multi-tenant approach to middleware and traditional integration, bridging the gaps among a host of devices and applications. One of the company’s largest success stories is working with mophie, a company that makes battery cases for mobile devices. The company experienced exponential global growth over the past year, but needed an omnichannel approach when it came to connecting with customers and selling their products. mophie was already using legacy SAP (News - Alert) on the back end, but chose salesforce.com for sales, service and ecommerce. The company needed help when it came to connecting the two disparate solutions.
“In less than 6 months, we basically orchestrated the entire omnichannel buying process for them,” said Leigh. “And then, in the next three months they actually reversed the whole process to redo the way they service and support their customers.”