IBM InterConnect: The Premier Cloud Computing & Mobile Conference

Sunday I arrived at IBM Interconnect 2015. IBM has decided to combine the 3 conferences – Impact, Pulse and Innovate into one Conference. IBM Interconnect- The Premier Cloud Computing & Mobile Conference. It started Sunday with the Business Partner Summit.

Monday the real conference started. There was a big American style opening session. If you want more information about it just look at #ibminterconnect on twitter or countless other blogs. As an integration consultant, I mainly focus on products like IBM Integration Bus, IBM MQ, Datapower, API management and BPM.

I attended some great sessions on Monday about what is new in the products. I will now give a short overview about what’s new. When I have time I will write an article to go deeper into the different products seperatly.  I will now just give the key features I found most interesting.

IBM Integration bus

Last year the Open beta was announced, this year the official release is announced. 

• Platform support is extended.
• Most important for me: The developer experience has improved. They did it by simplifying the installation, introducing the concept of a policy, some nodes are now replaced with connectors. There is also a connector framework available to create your own connectors in a simplified way.
• The data and transformation capabilities has been improved.
• The way IIB is connected with IBM MQ. IBM MQ is no longer a required prerequisites. You can run IIB without IBM MQ. On the other side IIB can now be connected to multiple Queue Managers and different Integration Node scan connect to the same Queue Manager. When you want to use 2phase commits (and who doesn’t want this ? ) you still need MQ as a transaction manager. The speaker said that they are planning on opening IIB so other transaction managers can be used.

Datapower

Nothing new was introduced since the 7.1 release in November 2014. To recap the 7.1 release:

• IBM renamed it to IBM Datapower SOA Appliance
• There is now only one singular, modular and extensible platform. You no longer have the distinction between the XG, XI and XB systems. There is only one and you can extend it with different modules 
• B2B Module
• Tibco EMS Module
• Integration Module
• Application Optimization Module
• ISAM Proxy Module

Some assets for Datapower are available on GitHub.

IBM MQ Family

• In this family I had my biggest surprise. There was the announcement of an IBM MQ Appliance. The release date will be 13 march 2015. It is ideal to use as a messaging hub or to extend MQ connectivity to remote locations. The appliance can run different MQ V8 queue managers. There are some restrictons. More information can be found on http://ibm.biz/mqappliance
• Fix pack 2 is being released somewhere next week. The most interesting change is the authentication. You can now use ldap to authenticate with an LDAP. The queue manager has to run on a Linux or Unix. This authentication will also be available on Windows in the near future. There is also a new concept of a “routed” topic. Basically you have some queue manager who know everything and connect with everyone. This way the traffic for pub/sub can minimized. 
• IBM is adding in support for MQ Light into the IBM MQ product. A new AMQP 1.0 channel will be available that can be used to connect an MQ light application with a IBM MQ V8 queue manager. A tech preview is available for fix pack 2.
• MQ Light is also available in BlueMix.
• IBM MQ Adavanced for developers has been released.

Author: Jef Jansen