How to Gain a Competitive Advantage: The Power of Enterprise Integration and API Lifecycle Management
This is the first blog in a series on API lifecycle management.
In today’s high-pressure market, you have to react quickly to business needs to stay ahead of the competition. And that’s not possible without being able to seamlessly connect applications and systems across your organization. Enter enterprise integration and API lifecycle management.
API lifecycle management — the ability to create, manage and retire application programming interfaces (APIs) — cannot be fully appreciated without first discussing how it all began. And that starts with enterprise integration. While it may seem unrelated now, by the end of this blog, I think you’ll see the critical role enterprise integration — and API lifecycle management — play in advancing critical business initiatives like improved customer experience, increased agility and higher ROI.
Let’s level set by defining enterprise integration.
Enterprise Integration: Connecting Systems for Business Transformation
Enterprise integration connects your business applications, data and processes across your organization’s IT landscape — with technologies like API management, application integration and messaging — so they work together as a single, larger system. Without enterprise integration, organizations would not be able to seamlessly integrate, unify and standardize core business capabilities across diverse IT environments.
Others agree: In a recent survey of CIOs, 93% of respondents state that enterprise integration should be part of their business strategy.1 It makes sense; the benefits are indisputable: Enterprise integration helps organizations share critical information, simplify complex IT processes and maximize opportunities. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Having enterprise integration in place also gives you the ability to:
- Access data from different sources and analyze it to gain insights into customer behavior, market trends and other key factors that can inform strategic decisions
- Connect with third-party services and applications, such as payment processing or marketing automation platforms, to enhance offerings and improve customer experience
- Expose application functions via APIs to allow external systems to access the application's functionality (i.e., Salesforce and Marketo)
- Develop and manage integrations in a consistent manner and ensure they align with organizational goals and comply with regulatory requirements
So, how did we get here? Let’s take a look back.
The Evolution of Enterprise Integration
A short trip down memory lane takes us back to the early 1980s and 1990s when enterprise integration meant locking into a single provider — a one-stop shop that served virtually all your integration needs. This includes having your ERP, CRM and business processes supported by one application from one provider. The downside? Businesses quickly realized there was almost no interoperability between applications outside the one provider.
Then came the concept of custom integration solutions, where integration middleware was developed in-house using ad hoc and proprietary protocols. Sounds good, right?
Unfortunately, over time, as more software systems were being adopted across organizations, the homegrown middleware system became increasingly complex and ultimately failed. Why? The proprietary systems were inflexible, not reusable and were built in an ad-hoc manner with point-to-point connectivity between each application. With this approach, organizations ended up spending more time on solving its integration problems rather than focusing on what the solution was intended to do in the first place.
These challenges were further compounded by the influx of SaaS applications and their rapid adoption across organizations. Soon enough, data was residing in multiple applications, which led to data fragmentation and data silos. Organizations were flying blind by not knowing what data they had, where it was stored, and whether it was protected.That’s when the need for enterprise integration became clear: To be successful, each application had to work together so that integration needs could be met and businesses could actually conduct…well, business, in an effective way.
The Business Benefits of Enterprise Integration
Now that we have some context for how enterprise integration evolved, let’s explore the critical business benefits it brings to the table.
- Improved operational efficiency: By integrating different systems and applications, organizations can eliminate the need for manual data entry and streamline business processes and operations. This can improve efficiency, reduce errors and free up staff time to focus on higher-value tasks.
- Enhanced collaboration: Enterprise integration can facilitate collaboration between different teams and departments within an organization. This can help teams work together more effectively and enable them to share information and resources more easily.
- Increased agility: Enterprise integration allows organizations to adapt more quickly to changing business requirements. This can help organizations stay competitive and seize new opportunities as they come up…a non-negotiable in today’s market.
- Better customer experience: By integrating customer-facing applications (such as CRM systems and e-commerce platforms), organizations can provide a more seamless and personalized experience. This can enhance customer satisfaction and boost loyalty.
- Stronger data management: By integrating different data sources, organizations can gain a more comprehensive view of their operations and customers. This can lead to more informed decision making and improved data management practices.
- Higher ROI: Enterprise integration enhances internal processes and business activities. By sharing important information, simplifying processes and maximizing opportunities, companies can improve operational scalability and improve ROI.
With such an impressive list of benefits, I hope I’ve made my case on why enterprise integration is so important to your business. But you may be wondering — what exactly makes up this key strategic business initiative? Read on to learn more.
Key Elements of Enterprise Integration
Let’s dive into the core components of enterprise integration. And this is where you will see how enterprise integration fits into the larger picture of API lifecycle management.
- APIs are key to enterprise integration. They process data transfers between different systems and enable you to share data and application functionality with third-party developers, business partners and internal departments. APIs are needed to bring applications together to perform a designed function built around sharing data and executing pre-defined processes. They work as the middleman, allowing developers to build new programmatic interactions between the various applications, people and businesses.
- Application integration is the enablement of individual applications to work together where each application is designed for a specific purpose. By integrating different applications, organizations can eliminate data silos. This can lead to improved data quality and more accurate reporting. Organizations can also automate workflows and business processes between different applications, eliminating the need for manual intervention. By removing data silos and automating workflows, application integration can reduce costs associated with data management and improve operational efficiency.
- Messaging in enterprise integration enables more efficient communication and coordination between different applications and systems. Messaging with security features, such as encryption and access control, ensures that messages are transmitted securely and confidentially. And, messaging can transform messages from one format to another, allowing different applications to communicate with each other despite differences in data formats.
- Events are records of action or change. They are a crucial part of enterprise integration because they allow different systems and applications to communicate and trigger event-driven responses for varied business processes in real-time. An example: In e-commerce, event-driven integration can be used to enable real-time updates of inventory levels, order status and shipping information across different systems and applications involved in the e-commerce process.
- Data fuels the continuous improvement of an enterprise architecture. Data-as-a-Service helps surface the right information to the right set of users that can then be interconnected to create complex data-driven applications.
In enterprise integration, APIs act as the glue that connects different systems and applications for them to work together seamlessly. By providing a standard interface for accessing and interacting with data and services, APIs simplify the integration process and make it easier to build and maintain integrated systems.
In the same way, API lifecycle management helps simplify and standardize the way that APIs are designed, developed and deployed. Both enterprise integration and API lifecycle management help organizations ensure that their APIs are well-integrated, properly tested, and effectively managed, leading to better quality, reliability and maintainability. And both help meet changing business requirements and integrate with new and existing systems and applications.
The bottom line? Without enterprise integration and API lifecycle management, organizations can’t effectively compete in today’s digital economy.
In future blogs, I will drill down into the role Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud™ (IDMC) and its multi-persona and multi-pattern services play in API lifecycle management.
Stay tuned.
Next Steps
Are you ready to learn how to manage your APIs, from design to retirement? Whether you're new to API lifecycle management or looking for a better solution, we can help.
• Learn how to streamline the management of your APIs with Informatica API Center, a service of IDMC.
• See how Informatica API Center can work in your environment with a free, 30-day trial.
