## 1.1 Integration has changed 

Over the last few years, we have seen a tremendous acceleration in which customers are establishing digital transformation initiatives. In fact, International Data Corporation (IDC) estimated that by 2021, driven by line of business (LOB) needs, 70% of CIOs deliver agile connectivity through APIs and architectures that interconnect digital solutions from cloud vendors, system developers, start-ups, and others.$^{1}$ It is a staggering figure regarding the impact across all industries and companies of all sizes. A primary focus of this digital transformation is to build connected customer experiences across a network of applications that use data of all types. 

However, bringing together these processes and information sources at the correct time and within the correct context has become increasingly complicated. Consider that many organizations aggressively adopted software-as-a-service (SaaS) business applications and spread their key data sources across a much broader landscape. Additionally, new data sources that are available from external data providers must be injected into business processes to create competitive differentiation. 

Finally, AI capabilities, which are being attached to many customer-facing applications, require a broad range of information to train, improve, and correctly respond to business events. These processes and information sources must be integrated by making them accessible synchronously through APIs, propagated in near real time by event streams, and by using a multitude of other mechanisms. 

The rise of the digital economy, like most of the seismic technology shifts over the past several centuries, fundamentally changed technology and business. The concept of “digital economy” continues to evolve. It was a section of the economy that was built on digital technologies but has evolved to become almost indistinguishable from the traditional economy . And it grows to include almost any new technology, such as mobile, the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. 

At the heart of the digital economy is the basic need to connect disparate data. This need led to the rise of integration, which is the need to connect multiple applications, data, and devices. As a result, the system delivers the greatest insight to the people and systems who can act on it. 

Agile integration architecture draws learning from hundreds of customer interactions and takes note of the dramatic changes that affect the integration landscape. The book looks at how customers are improving the agility of their integration landscape to align with the parallel advances occurring in their application delivery. 

This book explores agile integration  concepts in renewed detail and breadth, and is supplemented with practical examples and field notes that are gathered from the experiences of early adopters. Our aim is to collate meaningfully as much of the current theoretical and practical knowledge around integration modernization into one place to better enable IT leaders in their pursuit of digital transformation. 

