Integration Key to Customer Experience - Example Mobile Integration

Part 8 - Example mobile integration

In my previous article from this series we looked in to details that determine how your integration becomes the key to transforming your customer experience.

It started with laying out the process of how I've approached the use case by researching successful customer portfolio solutions as the basis for a generic architecture.

Let's continue looking at more specific examples of how these architectures solve specific integration use cases.

This article walks you through an example integration scenario showing how expanding the previously discussed details provides guidance for your own integration scenarios.

Architecture scenario

As mentioned before, the architectural details covered here are base on real customer integration solutions using open source technologies. The example scenario presented here is a generic common architecture that was uncovered researching customer solutions. It's my intent to provide an architecture that provides guidance and not deep technical details.

This section covers the visual representations as presented, but it's expected that they'll be evolving visually over time. There are many ways to represent each element in this architecture, but I've chosen icons, text and colours that I hope are going to make it all easy to absorb. Feel free to post comments at the bottom of this post, or contact me directly with your feedback.

Now let's take a look at the details in this architecture and outline the solution.

Mobile integration

The example architecture shown in the figure titled Example: Mobile Integration outlines how to integrate mobile in to your architecture. In this example, starting from the top, a mobile device is used to connect to your services through an API gateway.

It's leveraging a group of microservices that provide frontend functionality. These frontend microservices are gathering data and information from the various organizational backend systems by working through integration microservices.

Another group of microservices show how the mobile services (that were discussed in generic terms in the previous article) are providing mobile specific services such as push notifications, synchronisation, and more. This shows how customers are using generic architectural integration concepts such as microservices to solve their reliance on specific mobile platform solutions.

Here storage services are not displayed, instead reliance on container native storage is used for the various mobile services when maintaining application data, for mobile analytics, and any other persistence needs.

There is a conscience effort here to keep this example as concise as possible, therefore the integration of various potential backend systems has been simplified to a single representative box.

What's next

This overview covers the first example architecture for the omnichannel customer experience use case. 

An overview of the series on omnichannel customer experience portfolio architecture can be found here:

1. An introduction
2. Generic common architectural elements
3. External application details
4. API management details
5. Container platform essentials
6. Storage services
7. Example process integration
8. Example mobile integration
9. Example service integration

Catch up on any articles you missed by following one of the links above.

Finally, the last article in this series is taking a look at the service integration example that ties in all the elements we've discussed in our architecture for omnichannel customer experience.