The business world, and the IT industry specifically, is at an inflection point. The systems they use and the way they conduct business is changing. The ones that are best able to adapt to this new world will be rewarded and the ones that do not may not survive.
The inflection point is the shift towards mobile- and cloud-based services. This new paradigm has dramatically changed expectations for the delivery of new services or applications, specifically how quickly one can get access. Organizations must become more agile.
The IT Challenge
Organizations are rapidly adopting SaaS-based applications, and most analyst firms agree they’re using them to augment existing on-premise systems. IT organizations have more systems than ever to integrate and cloud-based systems help expose their services via open APIs. Unfortunately, the methods to access these services are different than the internal services they have been using for years.
Additionally, the move toward mobile is putting pressure on IT organizations to use open APIs, but their needs are different. IT organizations don’t just need to be able to consume APIs that are publicly available, they are being asked to move traditional IT services to an open API layer to enable new experiences for customers, partners, and knowledge workers.
This push for openness is in response to the demands on the organization to be more agile.
Becoming More Agile
Organizations looking to increase agility should reevaluate the methods and technologies they use for integration. An agile organization should be able to:
- Consume cloud based APIs
- Join two or more services and make them available as a service to address new requirements
- Expose existing internal services and make them consumable using technologies like REST and JSON
- Govern the use of these services
- Scale to meet the demands of these services and ensure they are widely adopted
Imagine the agility you could achieve if you were able to build a library of application-neutral generic interfaces that your developers could link together.
Join us for an ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks 6.0 webinar on Tuesday, May 13, and see how you can become a more agile company.
