Componentized services come to the foreground at Gartner’s AADI conference

I recently attended Gartner’s Application Architecture, Development & Integration (AADI) Summit in Las Vegas. It was an excellent event, attended by more than one thousand IT and application development leaders and enterprise architects, who had gathered to learn, network with peers, and prepare for what’s next. 

Gartner placed a glaring spotlight on the need for bimodal IT, which specifies one pace to maintain solid and efficient IT infrastructure, along with a faster, more fluid, and agile approach to fuel innovation. Faster innovation is required — not just to keep pace with changes driven by mobile, social, and cloud, but also to leverage the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT). These trends are driving a rapidly expanding array of data integration and management challenges — and opportunities! 

Within organizations, IT is also being tasked to migrate to IT infrastructure and processes that are placing the citizen developer front and center — from ideation, through rapid prototyping to optimizing monetization. Early adopters of this innovation-oriented approach are reorganizing teams, migrating, retooling, and gaining competitive advantages today. From an application architecture standpoint, Gartner stressed the need to leverage componentized services and next-gen approaches, including RESTful services, JSON, and more.   

As a DreamFactory guy, hearing all this made me feel as if I were in a dream. The challenges and recommendations highlighted throughout Gartner’s AADI Summit are exactly what DreamFactory is all about. We’re focused on developing the industry’s best open source platform for providing secure REST API services to both legacy data sources and new types of data sources, so users can speed development and innovation. As we like to say around here, you should “REST your backend” — but that’s really so you can get moving faster.