1.1 Integration has changed Over the last few years, we have seen a tremendous acceleration in which customers are  establishing digital transformation initiatives. In fact, International Data Corporation (IDC)  estimated that by 2021, driven by line of business (LOB) needs, 70% of CIOs deliver  agile  connectivity  through APIs and architectures that interconnect digital solutions from cloud  vendors, system developers, start-ups, and others.$^{1}$ It is a staggering figure regarding the  impact across all industries and companies of all sizes. A primary focus of this digital  transformation is to build connected customer experiences across a network of applications  that use data of all types. However, bringing together these processes and information sources at the correct time and  within the correct context has become increasingly complicated. Consider that many  organizations aggressively adopted software-as-a-service (SaaS) business applications and  spread their key data sources across a much broader landscape. Additionally, new data  sources that are available from external data providers must be injected into business  processes to create competitive differentiation. Finally, AI capabilities, which are being attached to many customer-facing applications,  require a broad range of information to train, improve, and correctly respond to business  events. These processes and information sources must be integrated by making them  accessible synchronously through APIs, propagated in near real time by event streams, and  by using a multitude of other mechanisms. The rise of the digital economy, like most of the seismic technology shifts over the past  several centuries, fundamentally changed technology and business. The concept of “digital  economy” continues to evolve. It was a section of the economy that was built on digital  technologies but has evolved to become almost indistinguishable from the  traditional  economy . And it grows to include almost any new technology, such as mobile, the Internet of  Things (IoT), cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. At the heart of the digital economy is the basic need to connect disparate data. This need led  to the rise of integration, which is the need to connect multiple applications, data, and  devices. As a result, the system delivers the greatest insight to the people and systems who  can act on it.  Agile integration architecture  draws learning from hundreds of customer interactions and  takes note of the dramatic changes that affect the integration landscape. The book looks at  how customers are improving the agility of their integration landscape to align with the parallel  advances occurring in their application delivery.  This book explores  agile integration  concepts in renewed detail and breadth, and is  supplemented with practical examples and field notes that are gathered from the experiences  of early adopters. Our aim is to collate meaningfully as much of the current theoretical and  practical knowledge around integration modernization into one place to better enable IT  leaders in their pursuit of digital transformation. 2  Accelerating Modernization with Agile Integration 1 IDC Reveals Worldwide CIO Agenda 2019 Predictions -  https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS44420918