OIH - Open Integration Hub

One of the main barriers to the spread of cloud technologies for smaller companies (up to 1,000 employees) has been the lack of integration of applications. Almost all companies of this size had a large number of IT systems in use, but these were generally only used as IT islands for specific tasks and there was little interaction between them. Although the same data was used in some cases (e.g. customer addresses), interfaces for data reconciliation were very rarely found. In practice, manual and thus error-prone and time-consuming reconciliation processes were the rule.

The goal of the project was the prototypical development of the OIH integration platform and its distribution as open source. OIH user companies can automatically synchronize their data between applications (e.g. customer or product data). By using the integration service, this data is always at the same level in the various cloud and on-premise applications. Manual data maintenance is largely eliminated and leads to a significant increase in productivity. The OIH should therefore offer a comprehensive portfolio of integrated solutions. To this end, the applications typically used by German SMEs were already initially connected as part of the project.

It was provided by implementation partners who offered their customers a cloud-based integration service based on the OIH. The integration of various cloud solutions was completely automatic for the user company and without cost-intensive setup. The OIH also had to meet the special requirements of German SMEs with regard to security requirements. In addition, OIH was to offer companies full control and sovereignty over their data at all times (data sovereignty).

Network partner: Cloud Ecosystem e.V. (consortium leader), elastic.io, yQ-it, Wice GmbH, StoneOne AG and Basaas GmbH as well as Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering IESE and TU Berlin

Project duration: 2017 – 2019

Total volume: 5,1 Mio. Euro

Funding volume: 3,7 Mio. Euro