Jitterbit Promotes Harmony Between Professional and Citizen Integrators

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For some time now, there’s been something of a revolution under way in terms of how organizations approach application integration. Once solely the domain of professional developers, the last two years have witnessed the steady rise of so-called “citizen integrators.” The challenge this has created is that both camps usually wound up employing separate tools that needed to be supported by the internal IT organization.

With the release of a Jitterbit Harmony Winter 2017 edition of an integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) environment, Jitterbit is now making the case for unifying those two camps by adding a module making it possible for professional and citizen integrator to work more collaboratively with one another.

Andrew Leigh, vice president of marketing and alliances for Jitterbit, says most citizen developers are only looking to integrate a handful of applications. To service that requirement, the citizen integrator module created by Jitterbit enables end users to self-service their own needs in a way that also allows them to reuse integrations created by professional developers, says Leigh.

Leigh says that approach creates a single framework for integrating applications that can span multiple tiers of an organization at a time when citizen integrators are now a mainstream part of the enterprise.

“Analyst firms such as Gartner are predicting that within the next three years, half of all integrations will be created by citizen integrators,” says Leigh.

The Citizen Integrator solution by Jitterbit provides modules for invoking application programming interfaces (APIs) exposed by applications running inside and out of the cloud, including Salesforce, NetSuite, Oracle, SAP, Box and Slack. Without any IT intervention required, citizen integrators can link applications together on their own or make use of prepackaged workflows. The latest release of Jitterbit Harmony also provides professional integrators with tools for accessing NetSuite, Salesforce, SAP and Workday applications as well as additional Web Services, OData and JMS connectors.

As the number and type of integration projects that IT departments will be asked to enable continues to increase in 2017, it’s clear that professional and citizen integrators will need to come to terms with one another. In fact, approached in the right way, as with a lot of application integration projects, the combination might very well be worth much more than the sum of the proverbial parts.

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