When considering innovation, organizations can’t ignore the new forces: Big Data, Cloud, Mobile and Social. These are often referred to as the Nexus of Forces, a term coined by Gartner. What’s interesting is that most of these forces have an effect outside of the corporate walls, mostly in the cloud or directly in the consumer’s pocket.
The Nexus of Forces
The cloud exposes applications to be consumed in a quick manner more and for a fraction of the investment required for maintaining or making on-premise applications evolve. Mobile is a great channel to engage in privileged conversation with consumers, but the expectation from the consumer is excellent experience and meaningful services. Social is an also great avenue for engagement, but it’s mostly a great source of information — information at the level of the customer, through which events positive or negative to the company can be captured and responded to in real time. Given the size of these social networks, the value is also getting insights from the data of millions of customers, which is only a fraction of the new information a company can leverage with a big data platform.
The value of these forces will materialize for the organizations that can seamlessly combine the information or business functionalities with their existing systems; integration is a requirement. The connectivity and scalability of integration platforms must cope with the increased volume of information exchanges. But the way integration is consumed by companies needs to adapt, too.
Opening Up to the World
While most of these integration solutions are for companies to leverage external applications or sources of information, companies are also increasingly opening up to the outside world. In their search for new business models with partners and customers, they need to expose a set of services as easily consumable as any other software as a service (SaaS) or cloud application. They also need to keep tight control on the quality of the service delivered, and to whom it is delivered. This is the foundation for their ability to monetize these services.
Companies need to integrate their business functionalities (as well as their partner offerings) and expose it as an open application programming interface (API) with the means to make their API attractive and easy to use, but tightly controlled with world-class execution. API Management extends the integration capabilities and extends it beyond the corporate walls, turning services that were designed at best to be consumed internally in open, reliable, and secured services for almost everyone to use. The organization’s API will then become the foundation of their customer, partner, and mobile channel, and a true asset in their capability to leverage the Nexus of Forces.
For more information, learn how to integrate your Nexus of Forces.
