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IBM Japan held a workshop on the “IBM webMethods Hybrid Integration,” a hybrid integration platform launched in June. This product plays a key role in IBM’s automation strategy.
Akiko Ueno, Director of the Automation Platform Division, Technology Business Unit, IBM Japan, explained IBM’s vision for automation products: “We aim to enable companies to use IT more strategically through AI-driven automation, enhancing their competitiveness, while also incorporating functions that make automation a powerful tool for corporate IT.” IBM categorizes its automation products into four categories: “Invest,” which optimizes IT investment management; ” Build,” a hybrid integration platform for application development ; “Deploy,” which handles infrastructure lifecycle management; and “Manage,” which enhances IT automation and operational management. IBM webMethods Hybrid Integration, the focus of this article, is a product in the “Build” category.
IBM webMethods Hybrid Integration is an iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) product. iPaaS is gaining attention for its ability to simplify integration development without coding, offer numerous cloud connectors, and rapidly create business value by combining REST APIs . However, “iPaaS also has its challenges,” explains Hirohito Onda, Senior Automation Technical Specialist in the Automation Platform Division, Technology Business Unit, IBM Japan. While iPaaS products are based on REST API access, not all corporate systems are necessarily API-based, making on-premises access difficult. Furthermore, iPaaS’s use cases are limited, and not all integrations can be achieved through REST APIs alone. “Trying to do everything with iPaaS alone will prevent the originally intended goal of streamlined integration across the entire company, and instead result in a proliferation of tools for each project and department,” Onda points out. He emphasizes the need for “hybrid by design,” a deliberate approach designed with hybrid environments in mind. “When it comes to tools, various tools need to be managed in an integrated manner. IBM webMethods Hybrid Integration is a product designed to achieve that goal,” he says. The hybrid control plane is at the heart of IBM webMethods Hybrid Integration. It enables centralized management of on-premises and cloud system integration functions from a single screen, providing environment management, user management, runtime integration, monitoring and connection management as SaaS . Application integration, event-driven integration, and API management can be used as IBM-managed services or run in the customer’s preferred environment.
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IBM webMethods Hybrid Integration also offers sprawl management, which classifies and visualizes integration runtimes scattered throughout the enterprise, managing the location and utilization of integration assets and controlling the sprawl of tools. It also features end-to-end monitoring capabilities. In addition to monitoring and managing integration runtimes, it can also monitor the status of each transaction, helping to identify performance bottlenecks. It also offers a variety of integration functions, one of which is application integration. In addition to providing iPaaS functionality for rapid integration of APIs and cloud services, it also offers a component called Edge Runtime, which allows flows developed with iPaaS to be run anywhere. In addition, the Enterprise Service Bus provides advanced integration with various core systems such as mainframes. It also includes API management functions, providing an environment that maximizes API usage while maintaining control of REST APIs. The control plane allows for integrated management of multiple API gateways, supporting not only IBM products but also AWS Gateway and Azure API Management Service. It also provides an AI Gateway function that visualizes AI services. The gateway centrally manages AI functions, applying policies , controlling access, and performing data masking. It also provides analysis tools and dashboards that visualize AI usage and cost trends. It also includes a function to generate MCP (Model Context Protocol) from existing REST API definitions. It generates MCP server functions from existing REST API definitions, allowing AI agents to interact with external systems.
This allows the generated AI to interact with API-enabled business processes, creating an environment where AI can automatically execute business processes. It also includes an event-driven processing function that controls, catalogs, and visualizes Kafka events, just like REST APIs. This allows detailed event information and sample source code to be accessed from both inside and outside the company. アイビーエム webMethods Hybrid Integration, which provides these functions, “is a product that embodies hybrid by design,” said Onda. “It places integration functions in any location and realizes the optimal environment for applications. It centrally manages integration functions with a control plane, and realizes composable IT by cataloging integration assets and making them self-serviceable. And it uses AI to reduce learning costs and improve development productivity.”
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