APIs - the building blocks for integration and digital transformation

APIs have gone beyond technical development opportunities and are now bringing strategic value to businesses. They are opening new revenue lines. Whether it is the Printicular app from MEA labs that leveraged Walgreens’ photo printing and pharmacies through an API or APIs provided by Salesforce.com, Expedia, Zapier, and Google, revenues have skyrocketed.

In an era of increased globalization, businesses are actively seeking opportunities beyond their local markets to access a diverse global talent pool.

In 2008, a significant outage in its data center prevented Netflix from sending DVDs to its customers for three days which prompted the company to rethink its IT architecture.

Organizations today are confronted with challenges arising from the growing number of applications and managing the volume of data being generated across cloud and on-premise environments.

Today, as business data increasingly proliferates a multitude of systems, app-integration teams are finding it increasingly difficult to keep pace. While a platform-based approach takes the pain out of integrating and scaling applications, the volume, velocity, and veracity of data are adding to integration complexities.

Site reliability engineering is a process that relies on software tools to automate and streamline IT infrastructure tasks like incident response, system management, change management, and application monitoring.

Many IT leaders are investing in cloud migration as part of their digital transformation strategy, but the industry’s success record has been patchy. According to a 2021 report by McKinsey, poorly orchestrated cloud migrations could cost enterprises up to US$100 billion over the next three years.

A UK-based telco migrated to the cloud to take advantage of cost efficiencies and scalability through cloud adoption. But contrary to expectations, the costs kept mounting over time and strained the telcos operating budgets.

Modernizing existing legacy applications is the first step in any organization's digital transformation roadmap. Other than preparing the groundwork for an agile, scalable and reliable IT infrastructure...

Data is continuously evolving, and with it, we’re seeing rapid changes in streaming architecture, data warehousing, platform clustering and more. Exponential growth in the volume and velocity of available data has made centralized organization and management extremely difficult...

Cloud migration is a notoriously complex process that presents enormous challenges with respect to data security, governance, and a host of other considerations. A recent study showed how 75% of enterprises struggle to secure infrastructure configuration, access, and APIs.

As digital marketplaces mature, they evolve, and we are now well and truly into the era of digital marketplace 2.0, where, as we explored here, differentiation is the name of the game. In a highly competitive world, a digital or physical item or service is much the same, regardless of where the customer buys it.

AIOps is a category of tools designed to bring the benefits of AI, most typically machine learning, to data generated by telemetry. The aim is to enable teams to evaluate and act on data faster, reduce manual tasks and human errors, and predict and so prevent problems.

Digital Marketplace products play a central role in providing a customer-facing storefront, where your offerings can be bundled with your partner’s offerings and sold online.

"Open APIs had a big role to play in standardizing access for interoperability across group companies and surfacing local capabilities seamlessly in a global marketplace solution." Joffey Chandy Business Unit Head – Telecom and Public Sector

When asked about what a telecoms network operator would look like in the future and what capabilities are most important, the CTO of one of the world’s largest telecom operator groups1 said he and his organization need to be a systems integrator.

The federal website funded by U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services notes, “the lack of seamless data exchange in healthcare has historically detracted from patient care, leading to poor health outcomes, and higher costs”.

Enterprises today have an enormous volume of data spread across numerous on-premise, private cloud and public cloud locations. Cloud data integration is critical for consolidating all that data into a single, unified hybrid cloud environment, enabling enterprises to leverage that data to achieve impactful business outcomes.

Data integration consulting can help enterprises understand the data they have at their disposal and use it to solve emerging business challenges.

Digital companies are laser-focused on customer experience. Creating data-driven, actionable insights is one of their biggest weapons in the war to win and keep customers, and this comes from being able to combine disparate data sets – data integration.

Enterprises operating a number of different B2B and B2C APIs across subsidiaries and operational companies (OpCos), need to have a comprehensive, effective governance strategy in place to ensure all their APIs are standardized and consistent across the entire ecosystem.

Digitalization is a top priority for businesses in the digital economy. Far too often, however, organizations move headlong into their digital transformation efforts without stopping to properly prepare their systems and processes for the transition.

The introduction of APIs is an exercise of integration. This cohesive umbrella, the structure to secure compliance of published norms across diverse users and often business units, is referred to as “API governance”.

Telcos and financial institutions can empower SMEs by bundling their core services and functionality in an “as-a-service” model, along with digital enablement tools.

This Infographic highlights the mistakes to avoid with microservices implementation and explains the steps for CSPs to benefit from microservice-based architecture.

In order to resolve the challenges of outdated infrastructure, you need a cost-effective solution that enables you to securely and quickly access and process essential business data from any device.

An API gateway provides a single, secure point of entry to access all your APIs. It offers a simple, consistent interface for all clients and partners to access your APIs and plays a key role in full lifecycle API management.

Designing, creating, integrating and managing APIs for a business is a critical prerequisite for participating in a digital ecosystem. And to leverage APIs effectively, a business must put a clear, realistic API strategy in place, start with small wins and then build on them.

In order to grab a part of the action and participate in the race to form digital ecosystems, every enterprise worth its salt is involved in a transformation of some sort. The market is now filled with digital transformation solutions to cater to this need.

An API store is a one-stop-shop designed for API consumers and partners to explore the catalog of API solutions made available through your company. The store provides a convenient self-service access to these APIs.

As enterprises expand their API-driven digital initiatives, a customer-centric mind-set with a focus on the “experience” element helps to attract and sustain traffic to developer portals, which are the face of an organization’s API offerings. A shift from just building a developer portal to building an end-to-end developer experience becomes important.

With increasingly new channels to market, nimble startups and “fintech” innovations, it is imperative that incumbent banks and financial institutions stay relevant through forging their own digital ecosystems and adopting API monetization strategies.

A robust API management strategy is a must to effectively monetize your APIs. Managing your APIs is not just about the security aspect but about how well they are designed, what implementation standards they’re built on, how they are deployed, their discoverability and monitorability.

A key outcome of Digital transformation is in the creation of new business models and meaningful partner and customer ecosystems that allow a business to evolve with the times. Instead of trying to compete by bettering your existing products and services, digital transformation is about disrupting the norm and offering new services and products that transform your business.

Here, in this post, we explain the role of open banking APIs in shaping the revenue streams of the financial services industry.

A well-managed API marketplace is a competitive advantage for enterprises to market their APIs. In this post, you will find three areas that will need your attention when building an API-driven digital ecosystem.

API management as the name suggests, helps manage the entire lifecycle of APIs – from the initial planning, design and documentation of APIs to deploying them and tracking their usage till their retirement. The API strategy of an organization sets the context for API management.

API business strategy is a component of your overall business strategy, where APIs are positioned as monetizable business offerings. A strong API strategy enables creation of Digital Platform business models that exponentially increase the value of transactions by creating a network effect.

APIs and integration as a means to connect internal and external ecosystems are key ingredients to success for digital transformation initiatives. It becomes imperative that they are done right - all the way from strategy to execution.

Competition to secure retail consumers has resulted in price cutting, as differences in service features is marginal.

Connected health is made possible by system integration services offered by CSPs. It is facilitated either through web or tablet apps by invoking the relevant APIs on the gateway.

For value creation, you will have to think about finding your core value provision, your core capabilities, mapping through IT systems built on APIs and making them open APIs.

The age of the platform: Winning in the digital economy means moving from digital silos to establishing your Business as a Platform using APIs