Application modernization can help your business improve application performance to support digital transformation goals. 

Often, enterprises operate their business-critical applications and processes in silos, causing digital transformation initiatives to stall or fail entirely. Instead, you need to integrate all applications to get a unified view across business operations, processes, and systems. This helps your business keep pace with ever-changing market demands and stay competitive.

Application modernization also helps enterprises drive business agility by assembling and connecting applications with unprecedented speed. There are many ways for your organization to move ahead with your application modernization initiatives. You can break down monolith applications into microservices, migrate applications to the cloud, or expose application functionalities using APIs. 

In fact, API adoption for application modernization is on the rise across all industry verticals. A recent survey found that 71.1% of developers expect to use more APIs in 2021.

Take application modernization initiatives to the next level: Drive API integration with iPaaS

API integration improves application modernization efficiency by helping systems communicate with disparate databases, devices and applications. Businesses use API integration to ensure data efficacy and usability. In short, API integration improves business processes without intensive coding needs.

iPaaS (integration platform as a service) is a cloud-based integration solution that helps you build and deploy secure API integrations and automate business processes.

Five application modernization capabilities you need from an iPaaS

As you build out your application modernization strategy, look for these key capabilities in your iPaaS solution:

  1. A unified platform
  2. A single integration platform accelerates modernization. It speeds up application integration, API creation and management, data set processing, data distribution, process workflow orchestration, and more.

  3. Codeless application integration
  4. A no-code application for application integration ensures all the necessary people in your organization (including non-developers, citizen integrators, application owners and the business owner) can build, monitor and maintain integrations and APIs. Plus, it saves time and money compared to creating your own complex code.

  5. Automation to drive efficiency
  6. Automation ensures business processes and APIs deliver significant productivity boosts. For example, you want an application modernization solution that can provide automatic mappings to improve integration efficiency. Seek out a solution with API monitoring and policy enforcement, so that your business processes are driven effectively in a secure environment.

  7. Support across clouds
  8. Look for a platform built for the cloud to deliver multi-cloud and native cloud support for the full range of cloud ecosystems and cloud applications. Usage-based pricing and the ability to mix and match integration tools are also key to ensure the solution fits your business. A good application modernization solution should also support serverless deployment, provide trust certification, improve advanced security and make it easy for you to update.

  9. Customize APIs for different needs
  10. APIs should free you from point-to-point integrations, so different lines of business can share data in real time. A good application modernization solution features no-code activation to make this possible and single-click activation of processes, events and data sources as APIs.

Learn more about how you can modernize legacy applications in the cloud.

Three tips for application modernization success

As with any large undertaking, there are common pitfalls in application modernization journeys. Overcome them with these key tips for success:

  1. Adopt one, unified iPaaS
  2. Often, teams get bogged down in an abundance of complex tools, which require trained professionals and specific expertise. Simplify the equation with one, unified platform like Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services that supports your application modernization journey. App-to-app or point-to-point integrations don’t scale in today’s business reality, where new applications are constantly being spun up. Ensure your platform integrates any application across your hybrid IT environment.

  3. Drive alignment between business and technology teams
  4. Making sense of your application estate starts with getting a full picture of all applications in use – across all lines of business. Too often, individual lines of business purchase SaaS or cloud services without consulting IT. This not only leads to redundant costs, but it also frequently means overlapping functionality. Work with leadership to ensure there is a clean process for bringing in new applications, so you can keep track of all the apps in play.

  5. Establish KPIs to demonstrate ROI
  6. Set clear expectations with leadership by identifying which KPIs you’ll be monitoring for application modernization success. Consider metrics that represent time-to-value and total cost of ownership, so you can get credit for your app modernization efforts.

How Informatica iPaaS makes application modernization easier

The Informatica iPaaS was created to solve common application modernization problems like complexity, poor communications and slapdash integrations.

Informatica iPaaS offers simplicity

Built for both multi-cloud environments and on-premises systems, Informatica iPaaS is a single intelligent platform that unifies application integration, API creation and management, data set processing, event processing and more. With all your data and applications in one place, it’s easier to monitor and process API events in real time and automate user workflows across cloud and on-premises applications.

Informatica iPaaS features a no-code user experience and drag-and-drop design for ease of use. It’s also cloud-native, with single-click activation for API providers like Salesforce, Workday, Oracle, SAP and more.

Informatica iPaaS provides intelligence

Intelligent automation fuels unprecedented productivity, collaboration and governance. Integrate applications and synchronize data to drive business processes across your organization. Informatica’s CLAIRE AI engine taps into data to make intelligent recommendations as well, helping businesses make smarter decisions. And with the ability to monitor APIs in real time, businesses can respond more quickly.

Informatica iPaaS delivers scalability

Informatica iPaaS meets enterprise business needs — it can process more than 15 trillion transactions per month, supports both multi-cloud and hybrid deployments and features purpose-built tools for developers and citizen integrators alike. Centralized operations help businesses monitor their data, runtime measurement and API protection — and even perform anomaly detection.

Discover more about modernizing your legacy applications with this free webinar.

Informatica iPaaS customer success stories

Explore how Informatica customers modernized their applications with the iPaaS platform.

Braskem

Braskem is one of the largest producers of thermoplastic resins. With all that manufacturing to track, application modernization to master its data management was a must. It needed simpler data integration tools and API management, as well as integration support across traditional on-premises and newer multi-cloud applications, to make the most of its data.

With Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services, the iPaaS, Braskem could modernize and transform faster while reducing risk and keeping manufacturing processes intact. It also performed an API audit to help orchestrate business processes across multi-cloud and on-premises systems.

In the end, this modernization made it easy for non-technical employees to bring in timely, trusted data and connect applications.

Grant Thornton

Grant Thornton LLP is the U.S. member firm of Grant Thornton International, one of the world’s leading organizations of independent audit, tax, and advisory firms. The firm uses Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services to bring together data from on-premises and cloud applications for analysis, reducing the data integration development and maintenance lifecycle by 50%.

“Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services makes our lives easier by helping us concentrate on the important aspects of our business and leaving the integration to somebody else,” says Ray Bernier, senior director of enterprise architecture, Grant Thornton