Businesspeople of all disciplines are going to be getting more involved with code and the creation and management of the software systems that we use to run enterprise organizations. There - we’ve said it - does anyone feel better… probably not right? So why is this happening and what is going to help facilitate it?
The reality of low code
At the one level we see technology vendors aiming to put so-called ‘low code’ platforms into the hands of people more directly involved with business requirements than the developers who have to build the software. Spoiler alert: it still takes a comparatively pretty technical person to build with a low code platform.
The reality of businesspeople and so-called citizen developers really ‘making’ software is still some way off.
On another level, we see service-centric technology vendors starting to bring non-technical project managers into contact with software platforms where they can help influence User Interface (UI) look and feel and some core functionality.
On perhaps a more immediate level and co-related level to service integration, we also see technology firms aiming to bring businesspeople into the way software is being integrated. The theory is, if we have many of the blocks of software functionality that we need -- and the business logic of the enterprise is locked up in the business brains -- then we should involve these people in the software development process.
How do businesspeople integrate software?
This is the backdrop to some of the latest developments coming out of open source cloud platform company Red Hat with its Red Hat Fuse 7 software release this month. The firm insists that ability to quickly and efficiently integrate custom and packaged applications across hybrid clouds can be a competitive differentiator for organizations today.
This software introduces a browser-based graphical interface with low-code drag-and-drop capabilities that enable business users and developers alike to more rapidly integrate applications and services using more than 200 predefined connectors and components.
“From the very beginning, Red Hat Fuse has been about simplifying integration across the extended enterprise and helping organizations compete and differentiate themselves. With Fuse 7, which includes Fuse Online, we are continuing to enhance and evolve the platform to meet the changing needs of today's businesses, building off of our strength in hybrid cloud and better serving both the technical and non-technical professionals involved in integration today,” said Mike Piech, vice president and general manager, Middleware, Red Hat.
The promise is one of a single unified platform for collaboration to enable the containerized integration of services across hybrid environments.
Portable containerization
The components in question are based on Apache Camel (an open source framework for message-oriented middleware used to define routing and mediation rules) and include more than 50 new connectors for big data, cloud services, and SaaS endpoints, which organizations can adapt and scale for legacy systems, APIs, IoT devices and cloud-native applications. Customers can also extend services and integrations for use by third-party providers and partners.
Fuse can be deployed alongside Red Hat 3scale API Management, Red Hat’s API management offering, to add capabilities for security, monetization, rate limiting, and community features around services composed from Fuse or elsewhere.
Cumbersome calamities
Why haven’t we been integrating businesspeople into any of these types of processes before now? Because, basically, it has been too cumbersome and too calamitously risky to attempt to pull off inside what might very often be mission critical enterprise systems.
Has Red Hat solved the problem of citizen developers (or indeed citizen integrators) once and for all at an all-encompassing level? No of course not. But it has attempted to take the cumbersome (if not the calamitously risky) element out of the integration process by identifying how we might bring disparate applications, services, devices and APIs together.
Red Hat used the term ‘across the extended enterprise’ and as we start to connect an increasing number of more granular parts of technology together you can expect to hear this term more often.
The number and range of technical user personas is increasing, get used to it
