The post Auto Draft appeared first on Reality Check.

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In my role, I have the privilege of meeting with exceptionally bright customers to hear what they are doing. Most of these customers tell me that they are witnessing the effects of the nexus of 4 forces – Mobile, Social, Cloud and Big Data. A lot has been written about the nexus of the four forces – Mobile, Social, Big Data, and cloud. But, I think more importantly it’s not just that the forces exist, but what are these combined forces creating?

From what our customers are seeing, we believe these forces are creating proliferation of 3 key assets: Data, Services and Devices. It is this proliferation that is pushing integration to be the key focus for all new applications.

Data Proliferation

Big Data is everywhere and the newest and probably hottest area in the marketplace but integrating this big data is key to deriving business value. Data integration can be as “simple” as creating a single view of the customer – basically creating a single logical record of the customer data across the enterprise so that all interactions with the customer are consistent, and all relevant data is considered as part of that interaction. As one of our customers who is in the pediatric healthcare business put it, this single view isn’t a nice to have but it saves lives by ensuring all drug interactions are known and factored in from their pharmaceutical, surgical and ER systems. But, data integration can be much more complex, involving statistical pattern matching, algorithmic correlation and producing a model that predicts whether a particular transaction is safe or fraudulent. No matter what the application, if you are talking about data proliferation you probably need some form of integration to bring this all together.

Services Proliferation

My prior blog entry on “Big Services”  describes this area, but consider a relatively simple transaction of shipping a product from your favorite online retail site – there is probably dozens of services that need to be integrated together to provide a seamless experience – Customer data from one or more services, product data from another service, logistics data from the warehouse, preference list from a predictive analytics service, shipping time from the shipping service, credit verification from the card issuer, etc. This is a very simplistic view since products usually come from one or more partners, and the logistics and product availability is derived from warehouses across the globe. Net net, though, is that integration of these systems is key to ensuring that the customer has a great experience.

Device Proliferation

Much has been said about Bring your own Device (BYOD) and the need to have applications that address iOS, Android, Windows, web, and the multitude of screen sizes, but the real device proliferation is around the “Internet of Things”. Integration of the information these devices create is a key enablers to new applications. Consider another customer of ours who is in the recycling business. They integrate GPS data with telephony data, and create an application where customers can view where the recycling truck is and alert the customer when their recycling container has been picked up via a text message. Again, it is the integration that makes this application interesting and compelling.

What This Means for You

Integration is the application, and it is only through integration of existing assets that new compelling applications can be created that provide differentiated value. You need to have a plan and partner that takes the proliferation of data, devices and services into account and allows innovation through integration, only then will you truly have applications that take your business to the next level. Conversely. I challenge you to find the application that has no integration!

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Regardless of the industry, size or company, the “four forces” are enabling businesses to transform processes and technology platforms in fundamental ways. These forces are driving new business models, new sales channels, and new ways to attract and engage with customers. By leveraging these technology trends, organizations can provide better insight into the business to plan more effectively and better predict everything from demand to the delivery of goods and services.

But the question is, how do you adopt the latest technology trends to innovate quickly, while limiting the impact on your existing investments and IT infrastructure?

Integration is key.

Why Integration? Because the best approach for adopting new technology trends is to leverage your existing business logic, IT systems and services. And integration makes it possible to leverage these investments while allowing  you to adopt new technology trends quickly, with less risk and reduced redundancy in data and logic. Businesses have made tremendous investments in their current IT infrastructure and want to protect and maintain these investments by limiting potentially disruptive or risky initiatives in order to adopt the latest trends.

Register for one or all of a series of webinars that explore this topic. Whether your organization is adopting one or all of the 4 forces or developing new technologies for mobile applications, public APIs, enterprise social collaboration, big data analytics or addressing data quality, partner onboarding, or process automation, this series of webinars will provide insight into how you can drive “Innovation through Integration.”

The post Innovation through Integration: It’s back and more relevant than ever appeared first on Reality Check.

Introducing Big Data’s cousin Big Services. What you never heard of Big Services? Well Big Services is perhaps a little shy. OK being a little tongue-in-cheek here but services are proliferating very very fast. And the business opportunity is just as big as taming Big Data.

Services are not a new concept; they started as design guidelines to creating reusable services, evolved to Service-Oriented-Architecture (SOA), and the now to API management. What is amazing is that we are in the age of service proliferation – by one measure public services that can be accessed over the internet are doubling every year and that excludes the hundreds of thousands of services inside the enterprise. Add to this the whole new suites of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings it becomes a nightmare to even know how many services are out there.

The sheer volume of services is one reason we could call them “Big Services”, but it is the complexity of the different service interfaces, issues of access and control, monitoring, lifecycle management, governance and access that make them really Big Headache Services!

Consider SalesForce.com which has one API (well that seems easy enough) but has a 1,000 page document describing how to access it (OK not so easy). Workday’s opposite approach of publishing 100’s of API’s with 6 or 7 versions. Each WSDL and schema is unique, with different data types (which many need translation form one API to the next), different dependencies (ordering of API calls make a big difference to the end results) and different security and access requirements.

In order to keep track of these Big Services (Volume and complexity) is no easy task. There is a need for software to help you do this. The software needs to provide repository services and a level of abstraction that ensures you work at solving the business problem at hand and not the complexity of the services call. Naturally the software needs to take care of error handling (like what to do if the service is unavailable), monitoring (like checking if the API is available and the average time per call), lifecycle management (like which version of the service to call) and a host of other service security and dependency checking needs. It comes down to whether you have time to build this software of buy it from a trusted partner.

Big Services are creating Big Opportunities: Online services such as Google, Facebook, Netflix and eBay are handling billions of application programming interface (API) calls per day and some companies are accounting for billions of dollars in revenue per year via API links to their services, according to John Musser, founder of ProgrammableWeb. Enterprises are finding that exposing their systems to the world as services create amazing opportunities, just like Best Buy who allows shopping and fulfillment via their API’s, or the EPA which serves up hundreds of self-service APIs that handle air quality to UV index monitoring, or 7-Eleven who exposed coffee purchase API information to determine the results of the election. It isn’t a matter of if, but a matter of when you expose your services to the self-service world, but if you don’t you will miss this BIG services opportunity. Naturally exposing internal systems as services creates its own set of Big Services Headache – stopping denial-of-service attacks, securing the service, publishing the WSDL and documenting the interfaces, and providing access to these services across the mobile and web world.

How will you take advantage of this Big Services opportunity, and provide your business with Big returns?

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