The enterprise architecture team found itself well positioned for the resulting IT modernization push, having already laid the foundation with an aggressive API strategy. The next step in AT&T’s transformation is a microservices journey. The team is taking monolithic applications with the highest spend, pain points, and total cost of ownership, and turning them and all the layers—UI/UX, business logic, workflow, and data, for example—into microservices. At AT&T the microservices transformation has tangible business goals.
APIs add modularity to your systems, meaning you can plug them in to any system whenever the need arises. This further increases development speed and overall business agility. 46% of teams using API-led integrations gained greater agility through self-service IT. Most businesses still run systems that were never meant to support omnichannel business offerings, and their architectures are monolithic. You now have CRM, ERP, analytics, marketing, and several hundred other business apps in your technology portfolio. We’re the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source solutions—including Linux, cloud, container, and Kubernetes.
Benefits of internal APIs
With APIs increasingly used to access and expose real-time data, this can be extended to more sources, such as data published as events. To continue to enable seamless B2B transactions and integration with partners and customers to keep supply chains moving forward, it’s clear that pivoting isn’t the answer, augmenting is. I’m referring to augmenting the power of EDI integration with application programming https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ interface capabilities to mitigate risk and capture new opportunities. Over a period of decades, EDI has facilitated frictionless commerce, helpedeliminate manual paper processes, and delivered significant and persistent, broadsupply chain efficiencies through automation. APIs have emerged as another way to enable B2B transactions and the approach is ideally suited for certain situations.
However, without the right automation, these tools and services can quickly become cumbersome and difficult to manage over time. Enterprises can accelerate their operations by incorporating API management tools, quickly testing, deploying, managing, and monitoring their API connections from one centralized platform. As clients across industries are aggressively adopting cloud, they have realized that a well-defined API and integration strategy sits at the core of this approach. A well-thought-out strategy will enable them to build a flexible, scalable, profitable, and long-lasting ecosystem of connected systems and applications to serve their partners, customers, and employees. Clients are increasingly seeking API-rich applications and platforms that seamlessly integrate in an ecosystem and ease the way of doing business in the digital age. In the last decade, AT&T embarked upon a series of mergers, uniting several large companies.
Identifying digital assets
Similarly, American Express uses its Pay with Points APIs to create mutually beneficial partnerships with merchants, arrangements that have increased retail sales, card spend, and brand loyalty. • Internal You can have internal APIs, which are private and managed by in-house developers using company resources like internal databases. In some cases, the developer doesn’t need to know, for example, how an operating system builds a “Page Setup” or “Save As” dialog box – they just need to know that it’s available for their use in the app using the API. B2B integration strategies can be complex and doubling-up investments or compromising performance can introduce unnecessary risk.
In 2017, they had approximately 4,000 instances of reuse, which Saxena values at hundreds of millions in savings over the years. Likewise, by September 2017, AT&T had 24 billion transactions per month on its API platforms—for internal, developer, and business-to-business applications—compared to 10 billion transactions per month in 2013. The number of APIs has grown more than threefold in that timeframe, and cycle time and quality have improved significantly. Though the API platform hasn’t removed all instances of point-to-point application interfaces, the bias is to use APIs. In the spirit of rapid progress, avoid the urge to exhaustively map potential APIs or existing interface and service landscapes.
Step 3: Determine what needs to be connected through APIs and how
As with reengineering technology, the API imperative embodies a broader commitment not only to developing modern architecture but to enhancing technology’s potential ROI. Incenting reuse before “building new.”Measure and reward business and technology resources for taking advantage of existing APIs with internal and external assets. To this end, consider creating internal/external developer forums to encourage broader discovery and collaboration. This is essentially a storefront that allows organizations to see, select, obtain and use available APIs.
- Developers no longer have to create their own communication or mapping tools when building an app.
- Microservices look to break larger applications into small, modular, independently deployable services.
- Menial and manual processes can be replaced with APIs so your apps and services communicate effectively without any point-to-point integrations.
- As mentioned earlier, what we design using the API design-first approach is the Edge APIs that fronts this API façade.
- Ecosystem growth.Using APIs, you can enable communication between external and internal applications to support new partnerships and deploy new joint offerings to users.
- Trefis estimates that Expedia, whose business is built mostly on APIs, will generate $12.3 billion in revenue by the end of 2020 .
Gartner says, through 2020, integration work will account for 50% of the time and cost of building a digital platform. So it is of utmost importance to build your digital platform adhering to proper development best practices. If you lack the proper experience or knowledge in designing integrations with the capabilities identified, it would be best to get help from an integration vendor. These integration vendors have vast experience working in many integration projects across the globe in different business domains.
Why is enterprise integration important?
When you call an Uber or Lyft and allow these apps to access your real-time GPS location, this is an API at work. Two-way communication between Uber and your phone enables updating in real-time, providing the user a comfortable and efficient experience. APIs streamline the development process to reduce the time and cost of launching new products. First, they make the data needed to create the products easily accessible. Second, they enable the development team to access and integrate some of the tools needed for developing products. Provide a digital experience to customers using a mobile and web application by exposing the company’s current capabilities through an online portal.
The plan needs to cover the full life cycle of the API program, i.e., from the initial planning and development stage to optimization. The items you need to look at when building the infrastructure are scalability, adaptability, and manageability. Data from Markets and Markets estimates that the API management market size will hit $5.1 billion by 2023.
What are the key elements of enterprise integration?
By establishing and automating API-based ecosystems, you can significantly enhance team productivity and increase your reach to scale your revenue. Here are two examples of successful integration projects to draw inspiration from. Data, specifically real-world operational data, enables continuous improvement of enterprise architecture. Data is also used to assess the criticality and usage of integrations and determine their target state. This is a highly critical step, but many organizations still do not devote enough time to it.
It also must ensure that only authorized API users make requests, and that API requests and responses are tracked as well. Management is vital for API visibility, governance and ultimately monetization; if a business https://www.globalcloudteam.com/services/databases-api-integration/ doesn’t know how many API users make requests, it cannot bill those users for API use. To manage requests and responses between multiple computer and software systems, APIs must be completely predictable.
Services
In that case, we can design the API for a reduced scope and then implement it. We can do this for several iterations, using multiple sprints until the required scope is implemented. This way, we can identify a design flaw at an earlier stage and minimize the impact on project timelines. The idea behind the involvement of the frontend team in the design is to get a better user experience for the API developer.