IDG QuickPulse * API Initiatives

APIs and the Need for Agile Integration

TO PARAPHRASE THE POET JOHN DONNE, no company is an island. Today’s competitive environ-ment requires that businesses integrate information across a growing number of cloud applications, hybrid cloud environments, legacy applications, and partner and customer environments.

Successfully integrating a variety of applica-tions and other IT components can be a major challenge for even the largest of organizations with ample resources, however. The quest for new, better, and faster ways to integrate applications is driving a wholesale cross-industry shift to adopt-ing application programming interfaces (APIs).

According to a survey of IT and business execu-tives conducted by IDG Research in August 2017, virtually every organization is deploying APIs today or plans to do so at some point in the future. A majority of the organizations surveyed (60%) are currently using APIs, and most of the others plan to start using them within the next 12 months.

API initiatives are reshaping the platform and integration architectures at many organizations. Most of the survey respondents are now using APIs to collaborate with internal users (77%), external customers (77%), and external business partners (62%).

In fact, organizations identify the top business benefits of APIs as improving collaboration (92% cited this as either “critical” or “very important”)

and developing partner services (90% critical or very important). Other commonly mentioned benefits include meeting industry regulations, cre-ating new digital services, and gaining additional revenue opportunities. (See figure 2, page 2)

When the executives in the IDG survey were asked what a company needs in order to stay competitive today, the most common responses were “support partner or customer integrations” (cited by 96% of the respondents) and “execute enterprise integration overall” (96%).

Collaboration, integration, and deployment are essential for competitive companies, which increasingly need an agile integration archi-tecture approach that supports distributed and adaptable integration by multiple teams within an enterprise.

APIs are one of the key capabilities organi-zations need for agile integration, along with distributed integration and containers. With this approach, integrations can be part of agile appli-cation development processes, providing more agility and adaptive solutions. This capability is vital for organizations looking to shorten the time to market for new products.

Getting Off the BusIf organizations want to effectively address the integration requirements they are facing today, they need to move beyond the status quo. They’ve been relying on legacy centralized enterprise service buses (ESBs) for integrating applications, but these solutions are too complex and slow and can’t scale to meet the new integration challenges of today’s business environment.

What enterprises need is simplicity, speed, choice, and the ability to integrate at scale as more business applications are continuously added to the mix.

Meeting demands for business agility depends on having distributed teams working collabora-tively on new systems for innovation projects. But

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Centralized integration centers unable to keep up

Source: IDG Research, August 2017

Figure 1: Current API Initiatives

Currently using Planned for next 12

months

Planned within next

13–24 months

Planned in 2–3

years

60%

38%

0% 2%

traditional integration services are provided by integration competency centers, which often rely on centralized and monolithic ESB technologies that are difficult to adapt and can’t keep up with rapid change.

Also important to organizations are the follow-ing abilities:

● Recover quickly when services go down● Increase application deployment frequency● Deploy changes quickly● Integrate with cloud applications● Move quickly from code to running success-

fully in the production environment● Integrate with hybrid cloud environments

The recurring theme in all this is that being slow and failing to support integrations aren’t a recipe for success.

APIs and Agile Integration Are Key to Digital Success

As revealed in the IDG survey, many organiza-tions are using APIs today as key elements for delivering digital services or are planning to do so within the next year or so. It’s clear from the findings that APIs are a key to quickly bringing applications to users, inside and outside the organizations.

Research firm Gartner Inc. has stated that APIs are the basis of every digital strategy. Organizations must not lose sight of the fact that APIs are the most essential, basic elements of digital business platforms, the firm says. They make digital business work by connecting people, businesses, and things, and those connections enable new digital products and business models and create new channels.

Adopting an agile integration solution can help enterprises attain the key goals of integrat-ing applications, data, and processes with APIs. Agile integration is essential for building more-modern applications, creating more-adaptive or iterative services, enabling and supporting existing and emerging use cases, optimizing the IT infrastructure, and leveraging cloud technologies.

The three pillars of agile integration—the key fundamental capabilities needed by today’s enter-prises—are distributed integration (lightweight, pattern-based, event-oriented, and community-sourced), containers (cloud-native solutions, lean artifacts, individually deployable, with container-based scaling and high availability), and APIs (well-defined, reusable, and managed endpoints).

These pillars provide enterprises with the flex-ibility, scalability, and reusability they require in a business environment that demands speed and the ability to change on the fly. And the ability to support adaptable integration by multiple teams within an enterprise is also essential.

A solution for agile integration should ideally be enterprise-grade and lightweight and be deploy-able on-premises, in the cloud, or both. It should be flexible enough to be part of an organization’s DevOps processes. This is especially important, considering that DevOps has become a strategi-cally important component of the development initiatives at so many organizations today.

Faster Path to Digital InitiativesOrganizations today are increasingly relying on software to deliver new services and efficiencies, and, in this emerging digital era, integration is essential to providing competitive differentiation.

With the growth of API-based applications, DevOps, containers, and microservices, reliance on legacy ESBs is no longer sufficient. Companies need an agile integration approach that relies on the foundational capabilities of distributed integra-tions, APIs, and containers. This approach enables integrations to be part of agile application develop-ment processes, providing more agility and adap-tive solutions, meaning that organizations can be more effective enablers of new digital initiatives. n

IDG QuickPulse * API Initiatives

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A solution for

agile integration

should ideally

be enterprise-

grade and

lightweight and

be deployable

on-premises,

in the cloud, or

both. It should

be flexible enough to

be part of an

organization’s

DevOps

processes.

Source: IDG Research, November 2016

Figure 2: Importance of Business Benefits of APIs

Improve collaboration

Develop partner services

Meet industry regulations

New digital services

Additional revenue opportunities

n Critical n Very important

27%31%

21%40%

21%

65%60%

58%37%

52%

92%90%

79%77%

73%