Visiting Gartner Summit 2015 in London

On 18-19 of May in the heart of London “Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit” took place. Most probably, you’ve heard about Gartner in relation to their famous Magic Quadrants that emphasize leaders in selected categories. Nevertheless, they do a lot of other interesting stuff including various events organization.

I was lucky to participate in Gartner event this year. Organization as always was great – interesting invited guests, fresh ideas and inspiring topics, good food and unusual entertainments. The most important guest was Stig from Top Gear with inspiring topic “Chicken chicken chicken”. Unfortunately, he caught cold and lost his voice. Participants could only take a photo with him:

Numerous serious themes were devoted to system integration in the cloud. Interesting trend about cloud integration that we in Idea Port Riga already noticed was mentioned. The thing is that integration Platforms as a Service (iPaaS) and integration Software as a Service (iSaaS) are becoming more and more popular. Both products are targeted also for non-IT specialists. As a result, lines of business start creating integrations without any IT involvement. Without a doubt, such approach has many benefits, but in a long term, business can end up with “The 21st Century Cloud Spaghetti Architecture”:

As a result, all problems that integration platforms were targeted to resolve in the beginning of the millennium will return in their cloud interpretation. There is no silver bullet that will resolve these issues. The only thing that Gartner and we can advise is to be aware of what business is doing, try to be proactive, and show the real IT value so that business understands it and involves IT while using iPaaS or iSaaS.

One of the most surprising topics was about application “Undertakers” by Gartner Vice President Andy Kyte. Slide with birth and death statistics in UK on an IT conference will stick in my head for a long time:

Topic was very serious in spite of new funny terminology that appeared during speech (senile applications and application-zombie, application assassin and application undertaker). The idea of the topic is very simple – everyone is willing to participate in new projects and create new stuff, but only very few of us are taking care of old applications, especially if application decommissioning is required. As a result, a lot of zombie-applications are still alive and eating significant amount of enterprise IT budget…

Amount of such zombie-applications will increase with time, and Gartner assumes that separate IT role will appear in the nearest future for application decommissioning. Application undertaker should take care of old application data and should turn off the last application instance.

In Idea Port Riga we already now pay special attention to full application cycle and try to think about application decommissioning even on the early development cycles, that’s why we are not afraid of application-zombie invasion. Don’t hesitate to ping us if you are still afraid of some application-zombie – or have questions about these topics!

About the author: Antons Matrosovs is a head of application integration capability in Idea Port Riga. He has 9 years of hands-on experience working with various integration platforms and participating in a wide variety of projects in different roles, thus becoming an expert in enterprise and integration architecture, business analysis, as well as project and team management. Antons is particularly interested in SOA Governance lately – he has recently taken part in several big projects, where it was defined as one of the highest priorities.