Enterprises will spend an estimated US$16.3bn on middleware software in 2015, an increase of 9.3% on a year-on-year basis. This is the among the conclusions in the analyst firm Ovum’s recently published report, 2015 Trends to Watch: Integration and Middleware*.
According to Saurabh Sharma, senior analyst, Infrastructure Solutions and author of the report, “With the ever-increasing need to ‘do more with less’, enterprises will be keen to adopt agile approaches to integration. Therefore, a significant share of the budget for integration projects will be spent on infrastructure modernisation, including the adoption of new mobile and internet of things (IoT) 
middleware, B2B integration solutions, and cloud-based integration platforms.”
London, UK-based Ovum has identified four key trends in integration and middleware that will have the biggest impact on businesses in 2015.
Integration and middleware trends to watch for in 2015:
• Digital transformation will drive a shift toward agile mobile application integration – Digital businesses require approaches that simplify the development of mobile applications suitable for a range of devices and integration with back-end applications and data sources. Enterprises will increasingly use mobile backend-as-a-service (MBaaS) and integration capabilities provided by mobile enterprise application platforms (MEAPs) / mobile application development platforms (MADPs) to deliver a compelling mobile user experience and improve developer productivity.
• Integration PaaS (iPaaS) and API management will move up the agenda for key integration initiatives – iPaaS will continue to evolve as an integration approach capable of meeting a wide range of integration needs, including on-premise, cloud, B2B, and mobile application integration. 2015 will see standalone API management solutions cannibalising the market for traditional service-oriented architecture (SOA) governance platforms, and API management for mobile enablement, software-defined networking (SDN), and IoT will be a key information technology imperative.
• The need for agility and better collaboration and data flow governance will drive B2B integration infrastructure modernisation – B2B integration will gain importance with the ever-increasing need for rapid onboarding of trading partners and customers, effective management of partner communities, and better customer engagement. 2015 will see a significant rise in the adoption of cloud-bases B2B integration services, and the complex interplay of data security, governance, and compliance requirements will drive uptake of comprehensive managed file transfer (MFT) solutions.
• A ‘somewhat’ standard IoT middleware stack will remain a work in progress – Enterprises will continue to use a combination of existing middleware and emerging M2M integration approaches for meeting the requirements of specific IoT use cases. Cloud-based IoT platforms will continue to gain traction and play a key role in the first wave of IoT adoption by enterprises. However, a lack of common (vendor and platform-agnostic) connectivity standards will hinder wider IoT adoption, especially from the perspective of enterprise IoT initiatives of reasonable scale.
Saurabh Sharma,Ovum
Sharma concludes, “enterprises need to undertake integration infrastructure modernization to effectively exploit the quartet of digitalisation, mobility, cloud, and IoT for driving business growth. There will be less inertia to a shift toward agile approaches to integration and/or cloud-based integration services, and this will translate into a growing market opportunity for both established and specialised integration vendors.”
