infoConnect for Kafka – An Overview

CRM and customer satisfaction play a pivotal role in ROI for businesses. Hence, there is an increasing demand for real-time data, but the ability to keep up is challenged in traditional architecture. With greater demand for scalability, improved resiliency, and continuous stream processing, legacy modernization is the solution for disrupting real-time demands. 

Mainframe and midrange systems, such as IBM i (previously known as AS/400 and iSeries), are widely used and account for over 70% of some of the most impactful daily computing transactions. Business applications and the underlying platforms can reliably process billions of operations, offer bulletproof security, and support the strictest data consistency and encryption requirements. On the other hand, most of the applications working on these platforms have been developed a long time ago and can be hard to integrate and evolve, and even harder and riskier to replace. 

Successful legacy modernization strategy typically involves keeping the legacy components that work best by adding real-time integration capabilities to unlock legacy data and business processes, enabling seamless collaboration with other systems, partners, and platforms. 

Infoview Systems Inc’s infoConnect for Kafka provides capabilities for companies to exchange events between Kafka and IBM i (AS/400) without requiring extensive back-end or integration development. IBM i (AS/400) Kafka connector provides Source capabilities for streaming IBM i Data Queue entries to Kafka, as well as Sink capabilities for sending messages from Kafka to IBM i Data Queues, or calling IBM i programs. infoConnect for Kafka is an add-on that works within Kafka Connect, which is a component responsible for declarative data integrations between SaaS applications, databases, messaging services, and other systems. 

Benefits of Kafka Connect include: 

• Data-Centric Pipeline – Usage of meaningful data abstractions to push or pull data to Kafka
• Flexibility and Scalability – Use of streaming and batch-oriented systems on one node (standalone) or scaled to an organization-wide service
• Reusability and Extensibility – Provides lower time to production by leveraging existing connectors or extending them to tailor to your requirement.

Operational Efficiencies using AS/400 IBMi Kafka Connector:

• Cost Saving/Risk Mitigation
• Increasing revenue/Improving Customer Experience
• New Business Models/ROI 

Conclusion: