How a Digital Integration Hub “DIH” Accelerates Innovation and Digital Transformation

Adi Paz, CEO, GigaSpaces expands on how Digital Integration Hub (DIH) can simplify an organizations’ digital transformation while drastically lowering legacy systems’ TCO. Also, how DIH architecture accelerates innovation by enabling the rapid development and launching of new digital applications and digital services.

Nearly every organization today is somewhere on a journey to digital transformation, or at least has a digital transformation strategy in place and for most, the road has been a bumpy one. As the pandemic unfolded in early 2020, many companies had to reorient themselves by expediting plans to become virtual and offer digital services. And now as we near the end of 2021, it is fair to say that every company has or desperately needs a digital component – they have no choice. 

The companies poised for the most success are those that are figuring out how to leverage technology to be the most effective digital disruptors in their respective industries. Forrester’s research has found that innovation leaders grow 3.6 times faster than the industry averageOpens a new window , and it’s no surprise that these leaders do so by embracing emerging technologies and leveraging them for business model innovation. In this day and age, it’s vital to know what the existing technologies are, what use cases are out there, and how the technology can be applied in order to solve the business problem at hand. 

A proper digital transformation requires planning, an analysis of business needs and existing computing platforms, and a phased approach. 

Ensuring Legacy Without Ditching Legacy Software

We live in a data-driven world. Knowing how to manage and analyze data has proven to be a promising differentiator for some organizations but it can also be one of the greatest challenges. Data volumes are increasing and becoming more complex which leaves businesses with the choice of either ignoring the benefits of digital transformation or embracing the challenges, gaining a competitive advantage in their respective market. 

For organizations to execute a successful digital transformation, they must reshape the way they think and approach data processing. Many businesses are beginning to realize the potential of in-memory computing solutions and are transforming data processing and analyzing into actionable insights. Applying these digital technologies through the transformation process can seem radical but it doesn’t necessarily mean you have to leave behind existing systems in order to modernize your current architecture.  

Many businesses make the mistake of adopting a technology simply because it’s new. However, determining what still works and what is needed should be the first step in any transformation. After evaluating architecture and business needs, it is often determined that modernization of legacy systems is the best and most straightforward course of action. 

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An Emerging Application Architecture Designed to Drive Digital Transformation

In today’s environment, it is vital to be able to rapidly develop and launch new digital applications and services. There is an expectation that each digital initiative must deliver high performance, elastically scale to support peak usage volumes, and be always-on yet, digital apps and services often rely on conventional architecture, causing innovation to slow down. 

So how does Digital Integration Hub (DIH) play into this? This emerging application architecture identified by GartnerOpens a new window , allows organizations to rapidly develop and introduce new digital services by decoupling their application programming interfaces (API)-powered digital applications from their Systems of Record (SoR), ultimately reducing the SoR workload. DIH capabilities include: distributed in-memory data store, tiered storage solution to automatically manage hot and warm data tiers, microservices data access, unified data models, co-location of data and business logic, event-driven pluggable data source connectors, and real-time cross-region replication, just to name a few. 

Furthermore, DIH can benefit companies through:

• • • Accelerated innovation and rapid development of new digital services with easy access to data and a less complex data model 
    • Great customer experience with elastic scalability, high performance and high user concurrency
    • Reduced integration complexity with multiple data access methods
    • Enabled 24/7 digital services without reliance on systems of record
    • Protection of systems of record from excessive workload
    • Reduced expensive access fees to systems of record such as MIPS reduction

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Who Has DIH Worked For and Why Now?

In a recent case study, a global investment bank and financial services company implemented a Digital Integration Hub. At the start of the project, they had 200 applications consisting of accounting services, risk management and pre-trade amongst others, and set out to increase this number by more than double. One of the major challenges with the applications and platforms was the inability to get a single view of the data since each SoR had a different API. A DIH solution was implemented and data access accelerated as the DIH provided a single API to seven SoR. 

The data replication from the DIH gave real-time asynchronous replication between banks in Hong Kong, London, NYC and Paris. This resulted in the bank gaining a cross-region, multi-geographical data fabric enabling the bank to facilitate trading applications and services – growing from 200 to over 400 applications, allowing for 99.999% availability and hundreds of simultaneous users. 

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