Jitterbit has released a significant upgrade to its Harmony Platform. The company calls it “the next era of integration, orchestration, automation, and application development.” It believes AI is key to helping organisations transform their IT.
Bill Conner, CEO and President of Jitterbit said, “In today’s digital era, businesses are navigating hybrid IT environments with countless complex systems, applications and data sources. The data divide is a growing reality and constraints on IT resources are hindering the advancement of automation initiatives.
“AI-powered automation is bridging this gap, enabling any organization to solve complex transformation journeys. By empowering both IT teams and line-of-business groups, organizations can boost productivity, efficiency, and responsiveness, creating more opportunities for innovation.”
What is in the new AI-infused Harmony?
While Jitterbit sees AI as key for Harmony, it also sees organisations and users wanting more control over its use. Its announcement talks about allowing them to “adopt AI capabilities at their own pace.” How customers perceive that will be interesting.
There are four key parts to Harmony:
- Jitterbit iPaaS: This is at the core of Harmony. It is a cloud-native integration that connects on-premises and cloud-based systems. It has its own AI chatbots that, combined with Harmony’s low-code approach, make it easier to deliver secure integration between apps. It also allows developers to automate key processes.
- Jitterbit App Builder (formerly Vinyl): Allows developers to build secure and scalable applications. It has AI support built into it to speed up the creation of applications using natural language queries. The AI enablement reduces and, in some cases, eliminates the coding required. Apps can be deployed on any platform.
- Jitterbit API Manager: Makes it easier for developers to create secure APIs. It allows easy management of APIs and provides full visibility into how an API is used. IT Security teams can also use it to enforce security as part of API lifecycle management.
- Jitterbit EDI Connects EDI with ERP systems and makes it easier to onboard new customers and partners. It provides a single dashboard to monitor transactions. The new AI elements enable AI-driven insights into business, especially the supply chain.
There are also three new AI assistants currently in beta, with no definitive date as to when they will be released as production-ready. They are the App Builder AI Assistant, Connector AI Assistant, and the AskJB chatbot. Jitterbit claims, “These AI tools unlock new levels of development speed, productivity, and user experience while boosting overall security, compliance, scalability, and reliability.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean?
AI is today seen as a table stakes in any software solution. For software platforms such as Harmony, AI co-pilots to help users find data and gain new insights into the business are becoming commonplace.
Of greater interest to Jitterbit customers will be the addition of AI to assist in application development. While many organisations are looking at speeding up development with AI, there are challenges. AI can deliver syntactically correct code, but that doesn’t mean it is optimised, nor does it mean it will work or be secure.
It will be interesting to see how Jitterbit develops that support for developers. It doesn’t, as yet, talk about using it to create test cases, which other platform vendors have focused on. Also, there is no mention of how it will ensure code is secure or what code the AI has been trained on. One would hope this is a closed data set created and curated by Jitterbit rather than just asking the Internet through a ChatGPT approach to coding.
Jitterbit has also not said whether it will use large or small language models. The latter is fast becoming the preferred option for building company-specific AI solutions, as the data is ring-fenced. It also has a much lower cost in creating and maintaining the AI model.
