Using iPaaS to Expand Integration Capabilities: Lowering Costs and Complexity Through Retirement and Consolidation

In 2012 Novartis did a strategic evaluation of their middleware strategy which consisted of two traditional, full-featured, on-premises solutions supporting over 140 active integrations. Both were proving slow and expensive to develop and maintain, and the team was spending time and resources on upgrades and maintenance rather than business value.

An integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) offering was used in an initial proof of concept (POC) to connect internal Novartis data with Salesforce.com. The technical approach was to select endpoint interfaces from the iPaaS library and modify them to fit Novartis-specific data mappings. This project took about 25 hours to complete, and saw a 10-fold cost savings over the tools and process they had in place. As a result of this POC, Novartis invested in the iPaaS solution and plans 600-700 integrations, 90% of which are on-premise to on-premise, or A2A, with 10% B2B integration.

Novartis subsequently decided to phase out their legacy integration middleware and starting in 2012, began migrating these integrations to the iPaaS. This year they plan to migrate off their second on-premises middleware system to address compliance risks and to match their cloud-enabled enterprise needs in the future. Novartis is also reducing the number of servers dedicated to integration from 28 to 8. They realized that ETL, EDI, application integration, and cloud integration are converging and an iPaaS solution can meet their requirements, now and into the future, quickly and at a low cost. This presentation will examine Novartis’ story.