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.”

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If you have a mobile strategy, you’re going to be using API’s.

It’s the “only way*” to support the breadth of devices to natively access corporate digital assets.

If you are already delivering API’s, and delivering them across different teams/businesses to enable a mobile strategy, why not just expose those same API’s to everyone and see what happens?

I’ll tell you what happens… people will solve problems.

IT will need to pivot.

IT’s job will become that of an enabler. Enable people to solve problems while protecting their company’s digital assets and ensuring business-critical applications remain going-concerns.

Think on this, it’s exciting.

*  It’s never the only way

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API Management Demystified

Several weeks ago, I wrote a Primer on API management and I have received tons of great feedback and questions from blog readers and colleagues in the field. It’s great to see people are finding API management especially relevant to their mobile and cloud strategy.  My colleague David Bressler (has written several posts on this topic – see Enterprise API Trifecta) and has experience addressing API management with both IT and business leaders. So we’ve decided to team up in an effort to summarize our experiences on a webinar called, ‘API Management Demystified’.

In this webinar, we will cover why APIs are important to your business, how APIs present new challenges, and the question I’ve gotten many times, what are the essential API management capabilities? During the webinar, we will share how customers have had success getting their API projects started on the right foot. Please join us for live Q &A at the end of the webinar to get your questions answered and comments addressed. And don’t worry, we’ll be emailing all registrants with the recording so even if you can’t make it, be sure to register. If you’d like to submit a question in advance of the webinar, please leave a comment on the blog and we’ll be sure to answer your question during the webinar. We look forward to seeing you there!

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According to IDC, for “the past several years, the IT industry’s transition to the 3rd Platform, built on mobile computing, cloud services, social networking, and big data analytics technologies, has dominated the annual Predictions… For 2013, IDC predicts the transition to the 3rd Platform will shift into high gear as the industry accelerates past the exploration phase and into full-blown, high stakes competition.”

Yes folks, the time is now. Gartner echoes the same beliefs. “Mr. Cearley said these strategic technologies are emerging amidst a nexus of converging forces – social, mobile, cloud and information. Although these forces are innovative and disruptive on their own, together they are revolutionizing business and society, disrupting old business models and creating new leaders. As such, the Nexus of Forces is the basis of the technology platform of the future.”

And our customers are ready for change too. We recently polled over 800 ProcessWorld attendees and the survey confirms that Big Data, Cloud, Mobile and Collaborative technologies will show adoption rates of over 20% in the next 24 months. The simultaneous adoption of these technologies is significantly changing the way enterprises do business and accelerating the reaction of enterprises to changing customer and market behavior. Asked to identify technologies that will open major business opportunities, over 20% of responders see the management of Big Data and collaborative work practices as important technologies, over 30% see Cloud and mobile applications driving new business and over 40% see BPM as the key technology in the digital enterprise.

At ProcessWorld 2012 Software AG announced a major update to its webMethods and ARIS business process product suites focusing on integrating Big Data with Business Processes and the Cloud. The validity of this strategy has been fully confirmed by this survey. “Driving the adoption of these technologies is the need for faster, better informed business decisions”, stated Software AG CTO, Wolfram Jost. “But the real-time data, rapid scalability and fast decision making enabled by these technologies are of little use if companies still take months or years to implement business process change. The market will not wait, By integrating business processes with Big Data, the Cloud and both Mobile and Collaborative applications we are giving enterprises an uninterrupted rapid response service to changing market conditions”.

ProcessWorld attendees primarily saw the integration of on and off premise application integration as the main driver for Cloud adoption. “Rapid scalability is key in the light of the survey’s findings”, said Wolfram Jost. “And rapid integration of existing on-premise infrastructure with Cloud based applications is a significant feature of webMethods 9.0. We developed both webMethods 9.0 and ARIS 9.0 in close cooperation with major customers and this survey shows that we are right on track”.

The impact of these technologies is huge. Organizations can save billions of dollars a year and dramatically increase their operating profit by adopting and implementing these strategic technologies. Is your enterprise ready for the new wave of cloud, mobile, social and big data? Where does your organization see the most value in the 4 forces?

The post Big Data, Cloud, and Process Management Are Driving the Digital Enterprise appeared first on Reality Check.

Every other customer I talk to wants to leverage mobile as a key business channel. Consider this – more people on earth have access to mobile phones than a toothbrush(1). That makes everyone with a mobile phone a potential target for your business. No wonder that 61% of the CIOs plan to enhance their mobility capability during the next three years(2). And, mobile apps and middleware spending is up by 45% in 2012.(3)

Broadly speaking, the kind of mobile apps that companies are investing in are –

• Business to enterprise to increase worker productivity especially those who are customer-facing
• Business to consumer to improve customer satisfaction & deepen customer loyalty, and
• Government to citizen to provide information at fingertips and better serve the citizens

But implementing great mobile apps is fraught with challenges when it comes to integrating these apps with rest of the enterprise systems. The key issue I hear from our customers is how to provision mobile apps to access core enterprise systems in a way that is secure and maintains the integrity of these internal systems. In addition, there are several other challenges, such as –

• How to offer reliable mobile user engagement given intermittent connectivity
• How to integrate mobile apps with back-end data sources
• How to assert control over deployed apps
• How are our apps being used, how much and on what platforms
• How to offer consistent authentication and authorization for native, hybrid and web apps

To address these challenges, an architecture based on SOA principles has two major layers –

• Service Mediation Layer
  

  SOA based architecture for enterprise mobile apps

• Business Services Layer

The business services layer enables core enterprise systems to deliver capabilities (functionality and data) as reusable, standards-based services. Residing inside the firewall, these services do the heavy lifting. They perform the most complex business tasks that are needed by enterprise-class mobile apps. However, they do not interact directly with the mobile apps. The service mediation layer acts as a proxy to these services managing all interactions between mobile apps and internal core systems. This is the layer where security is enforced, denial of service attacks are repelled, apps usage and performance is tracked, and messages are translated and routed. The service mediation layer provides a clean way to consolidate all quality-of-service requirements, eliminating the need to code these into individual apps.

Bank of Oklahoma app on the iPad

Many of our customers have used this approach to successfully drive their mobile strategy. An excellent example is Bank of Oklahoma Financial. Head-quartered in Tulsa, Oklahoma with full service branches in 8 states, the bank leveraged their SOA infrastructure to deliver retail banking mobile apps in just 4 months! Not only did they experience outstanding system performance but also negligible production issues. Over time they experienced a large chunk of their customers migrating from web to mobile to access their accounts and lowered call volume to their call centers. That’s the kind of value great mobile apps can deliver for your business.

So, what’s your take? Is this the approach you are taking to fend-off mobile integration challenges? I would love to hear from you.

Sources:

1. Main Street Analyst, More Mobile Phones Than Toothbrushes – Infographic, Jan 2013
2. Gartner, Inc., Magic Quadrant for Mobile Application Development Platforms, April 2012
3. Forrester Research, Inc., Forrsights Budgets And Priorities Tracker Survey, Q4 2011 and Q4 2010

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Gartner’s Nexus of Forces

What we are seeing among our customer base is that breakthrough innovation happens when applications tap into the synergy created by at least two (not just one) of these computing models and are tied back into their core enterprise systems. For instance –

• Echo Entertainment, which is in the hospitality and gaming industry, combined the power of Big Data and Mobile to increase the quality of its loyalty program signups. It identified ‘high rollers’ playing in the casino to its floor staff in real time using a mobile app that combined live data from the gaming systems with large amounts of historical data in backend databases to perform in-flight analytics.
• Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) maintains vast datasets of highly distributed information around water, air, waste, and natural resources. It combined the power of Big Data and Cloud by creating and hosting a publicly accessible API that made the data accessible to not only its partner state agencies but also external developers.
• Nemours Children’s hospital a leader in pediatric care combined the power of Social and Information to create ‘smart’ patient rooms. A patient’s arrival triggers an event that enables the system to automatically provision the room with the child’s favorite video games and other electronic entertainment. When a caregiver walks into the patient’s room, another event is triggered enabling the system to retrieve their information from the hospital’s HR system and display it on the room’s TV for immediate identification.

The key point and underpinning of these innovative applications is an event enabled service-oriented architecture. It makes sense, if you think about it. To be truly useful, mobile apps require access to the backend systems via a layer of services. Big Data needs services to deliver relevant and timely business data in order to perform useful analytics. Social applications require combining enterprise events with enterprise data and activity streams where data is delivered by data services. And Cloud requires strong service-oriented governance infrastructure both as a provider as well as consumer of services. Monolithic, client-server, 3-tier architectures cannot provide the extensibility, scalability and agility needed for such innovation.

*Source: Gartner, Inc., The Nexus of Forces: Social, Mobile, Cloud and Information, Chris Howard, et al., June, 2012.

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To crisply state what was discussed in the report, here are the predictions -

• By 2016, midsize to large companies will spend 33% more on application integrations than in 2013.
• By 2016, the integration of data on mobile devices will represent 20% of integration spending.
• By 2017, over two-thirds of all new integration flows will extend outside the enterprise firewall.
• By 2018, more than 50% of the cost of implementing 90% of new large systems will be spent on integration.

I will let you read through the report to understand the details of the “whys”. However, my thoughts are in total sync and agreement on what has been said. Let us discuss a few reasons as to why these predictions are very realistic.

1. As discussed in a previous post of mine, Application Integration is more relevant today than ever. For reasons explained in that post, it only makes more sense that midsize to large companies will spend more on integration in the coming years.
2. Mobile is an explosive market. Every enterprise I have talked to, in the last six months, has “Mobility enablement” as one of their top priorities. It is just natural for them to treat the mobile interface as yet another composite application reaching into the backend to deliver the data and logic from various applications. So, integration spending is necessary in this regard.
3. Mobile and SaaS integrations lend themselves to the more critical requirement of being able to access your back-end applications from outside your firewall. Again, I concur with Gartner on the statement that more number of integration flows will extend beyond your DMZ.
4. With the explosive growth of SaaS offerings, companies will probably spend more time and money on integrating such applications than in actual development. So, it shouldn’t be a surprise if the last prediction comes true as well.

There is a lot of emphasis on B2B growth in the report. I agree with the assessment but I don’t think that that alone will be a major factor for some of the predictions. Do not under-estimate the mobile growth. As a matter of fact, it is going to enhance the B2B space as well.

The other thing that I really love in this report is the recommendation given to CIOs, Managers and Architects to focus on your ICC (Integration Competency Center) implementation. This is a favorite topic of mine. Maybe, in one of the subsequent posts, I will talk more on this. For now, I am signing off as it is getting close to the Welcome Reception at the Gartner AADI show. Look forward to more posts from the show. You can also follow my tweets from the show at my handle @AppInt4All.

The post Gartner Predictions 2013 for Application Integration: My take appeared first on Reality Check.

Why couldn’t there be a “corporate instagram-like success”?

Why can’t a corporate enterprise service bus excite imagination the way Twitter has?

Often its the people way down in the trenches that have great ideas about improvements to the business. Other times, it’s just someone that has an itch to scratch. That’s why, give me five minutes in a non-busy store here in NYC and I’m behind the counter talking to the barrista/copy-guy/pharmacist about the systems they use to get their job done.

I believe there are ideas everywhere. And, if I were a CIO I’d make sure anyone in the company could innovate the same way they can in the consumer space.

Take the following example from my own career.

A long, long time ago, in an economy far, far away I was a pre-sales engineer at a network integrator. We were about 15 people; I supported 3 or 4 sales people. We I did the bill of materials for our proposals in Excel. All layout, pricing, and deal profitability analysis was done in Excel at the same time. To make my job easier, and to dramatically improve my throughput and accuracy, I customized the heck out of Excel. And, I did it in a way that made it easy for others to help me – like printing the right formats (for the customer, for management), examining deal-profitability metrics, and even some error correction to catch missing components. This is what young, energetic people who are full of ideas do. And, if we don’t enable them to do it at work, they’ll do it on the side and start their own business.

Fast-forward 20 years, and here we are. Instead of visual basic we have API‘s to let you do anything and online programming classes for marketing to teach you how. In fact, there are even small companies (here and here) who require all employees to learn to code.

Let’s take a closer look at API trends that could help enterprises unlock the energy of its employees to dramatically improve innovation.

Segmenting the API Market

When it comes to API’s and API management, there are two personas to think about, and three use cases to address.

The 2 personas are:

1. People who provide API’s (providers)
2. People who consume API’s (consumers)

The 3 use cases are:

1. Internal API usage
2. B2B API usage
3. External API usage

Segmenting in this way helps IT focus on how they speak to the different values and opportunities that each combination presents. It’s helps us to understand how API trends apply to us, and how to stay focused on adding value to the needs of enterprise IT.

In the context of *providing* API’s to an *internal* audience, here are 3 key behaviors IT can copy from the consumer market in order to capture innovation.

#1 API Management

One way to understand the trend around API’s is to take the perspective that API’s are the new website. If this is the case, why would it be any different inside the organization than it is outside? Today companies give employees pages full of information, tomorrow it will be API’s to data, events, and processes. Doing so presents challenges. Challenges to compliance. Challenges to support. Challenges around governance.

API Management provides a solution to these challenges and more. It provides a way to integrate IT more positively with the youngest generation in the workplace. A generation that has grown up digitally, and by its very nature has different needs from IT than generations prior.

#2 Code Academies

If you’re giving your employees API’s to important and useful corporate information via API, why not teach them to use it properly? And, if you think it’s just IT that’s learning to code, you’re wrong. The millennial generation is a familiar with technology as you are with a typewriter. They want a reason to learn to code, give them one or they’ll find their own reasons (and start their own companies on the side).

There’s a lot of energy in the business of teaching people to code. You may think they won’t be any good, that marketing people don’t have the skills or experience to write good apps. You’d be correct. But, I’d point out all the crappy websites that exist, and share my belief that quality will get better over time, and won’t be something that stops people from trying (or believing they have the right to contribute in this way). Bring these technologies in-house, train your own employees, and then set them loose…

#3 Hackathons & Coding Challenges

The third leg of the API trifecta are group coding efforts. Hackathons and coding challenges are used by the startup community and government to get people to contribute ideas in a constructive and collaborative fashion.

If you’re a large organization, why not have some internal programs to capture ideas and turn them into something the business can use? You’d be taking the people with ideas, and giving them a forum to use the API’s you’ve created and the learning-to-program training they’ve completed. You’d be pointing them at real business problems and seeing the solutions they create. Winners in the consumer space might win an award or a gift card. Or, they might enjoy the recognition that comes from having your app promoted on the NYC Subway or Apple App Store.

Why can’t an internal winner win executive sponsorship for their idea, to see if really can have an impact to the business? Isn’t this a great way to both bubble up ideas from the bottom, involve the generation who feels they have the right to participate, and develop your next generation of business leaders all the at same time?

The Trifecta

There you go, the Enterprise API Trifecta: 3 elements IT can incorporate from the consumer space today in order to create a more innovative and collaborative IT environment.

For additional insight into how IT can create a platform for internal innovation using a SOA infrastructure (including customer stories) why not watch this webinar on SOA Innovation that I recorded in November 2012.

The Enterprise API Trifecta is an excerpt from a thought piece I’m working on tentatively titled: The Consumerization of Integration: 10 Best Practices Enterprise IT Should Steal from the Consumer Space to Capture Innovation & Build a Mobile Strategy. Drop me a line if you’d like to hear more.

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It’s the expectations they’re bringing that should keep you up at night.

(My sincere apologies to our US readers to whom I’ve disturbed just before a holiday.)

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At a recent event, Gartner analyst, Val Sribar broke it all down, explaining that next-generation business apps will have to look and act like consumer applications. That’s right. That means your apps will need to meet a whole new set of expectations. Generation Y (and Z) will expect business apps to work on any device—especially mobile devices. In the not-too-distant future, they may even expect to use devices they actually wear—like jewelry. No kidding.

The application experience will need to be seamless, no matter what the device they use or where they happen to be. Business users won’t care if they’re accessing data on an internal corporate system or in their own personal clouds.

Real-time analytics, easy collaboration and access to expertise—all of this will need to be built into the app itself. And someday soon, users will even rate your applications. Will yours get five stars? Because if your app doesn’t rate well, or work the way users want it to, they’ll personalize them their own apps. Or worse, build their own apps and call on IT for help when they get stuck.

Are you ready for this new wave of next-generation expectations?

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