INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Software for Business
Trends and
technologies fuelling
the evolution of
Middleware
The term ‘middleware’ has been used
for many years to broadly categorise the
set of behind-the-scenes technologies
designed to help enterprises create,
connect, and manage the myriad of
software applications that run today’s
businesses.
T
hese applications can vary
greatly, but are all meant
to address specific business
needs, such as insurance claims
automation, financial fraud detection,
transaction processing, or even to
provide tailored interactions with
customers based on time, location,
preferences, and more, writes Mike
Piech, Vice President and General
Manager, Middleware, Red Hat.
Business needs and technology
capabilities change and adapt to
one another in a cyclical fashion over
time, with new business needs fuelling
innovations in technology and those
innovations in turn giving birth to new
business requirements.
We’ve witnessed the impact of this cycle
on the middleware market with trends
such as service-oriented architecture
(SOA) and web services impacting
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INTELLIGENTCIO
TODAY, WE SEE THE
OUTCOME OF THAT
SHIFT, AS SOFTWARE
HAS BECOME A
LEADING COMPETITIVE
DIFFERENTIATOR FOR
ORGANISATIONS ACROSS
MAJOR VERTICAL
INDUSTRIES
both development approaches and
technologies in the not-too-distant past.
Microservices architectures
Another recent trend that is helping
to redefine enterprise application
development and the associated
middleware technologies is the growing
popularity of microservices architectures.
The monolithic applications of the
past could not easily be changed,
often causing a painful ripple effect
on the business when changing
market conditions or new regulatory
requirements demanded changes to the
application in order to adapt.
Service-oriented architecture (SOA)
emerged as a way to help reduce the
pain and minimise the disruption of
change through the modularisation of
applications into specialised “services”
that independently perform separate
functions of the application.
Today, the trend toward microservices
takes this concept even further, resulting
in not merely applications being
decomposed into a larger number of
modules, each of which is smaller and
more narrowly focused. In many ways,
microservices can be seen as a natural
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