Welcome

Unit4 Integration Kit (U4IK) is bridging the Unit4 ecosystem, based on messaging and well-defined business objects, with the external world – by offering Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIPs) through components supporting, among others, content-based routing, transformation, content enrichment and validation.

Because of shifts in the volume, velocity and variety of data and the granularity of micro-services, legacy Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) technology can no longer effectively deliver on its original promise. As the enterprise continues to migrate more toward micro-services (complex applications broken down into small, independent processes) even more pressure is exerted downward on traditional ESB solutions, moving them further into the sunset. The problem with the traditional ESB is that its very fabric makes it incompatible with the nature of modern data. APIs have become the de facto method for interfacing to both enterprise and web systems – primarily using the REST protocol with the data encoded via JSON.

U4IK is therefore not provided via traditional ESB technology, but via a set of discrete multi-tenant, cloud native micro-services as part of Unit4's People Platform. The objective of this set of micro-services is facilitating EIPs to guarantee mission-critical message exchange between Unit4 ecosystem and external applications. With U4IK, Unit4 delivers an integration platform that can solve integration challenges of enterprises by supporting the creation, maintenance and provisioning of generic reusable Integration Flows. We facilitate “tech-savvy” people (technical consultants and/or citizen integrators) in creating Integration Flows as content/ configuration, to connect Unit4 apps with external systems in a declarative way via drag and drop in a canvas. With U4IK, we deliver a low-code/no-code data integration experience for third-party connectivity.

U4IK is lightweight but highly scalable, it manages all the interactions between applications and components transparently, regardless of the underlying transport protocol used. Integration Flows will be injected and processed by microservices that can process whatever orchestration of EIPs using tenant-specific context injection @runtime, instead of coding and deploying the actual (coded parts of the) integration solution upfront. These microservices contain a rule based routing & mediation and EIP processing engine.

In this documentation you will find an overview of the U4IK, including the main concepts and components