New Beginnings for your Digital Transformation

The continuous development and excessive usage of APIs is effecting all industries, and it opens up endless possibilities in terms of information flow, triggering new business models on a global scale for all industries.

New beginnings for your digital transformation

In October 2017, Nordic APIS arranged The 2017 Platform Summit event in Stockholm, where SEEBURGER attended as guest speaker (https://nordicapis.com/sessions/the-impact-of-digital-transformation-the-need-for-having-a-blended-approach-to-business-integration/)

Reflecting on this event, and also looking at some of the traditional industries, many of these enterprises are in the midst of the digitalization processes and are now offered the opportunity to use APIs.

The first step was to go from manual to digital process. Now traditional industry is entering ”phase 2” of the digitalization process. In order to focus on core business, the technical and business platform on which the industry rely have to be even more efficient and streamlined. The digital evolution is pushing industries to reshape in many ways. The utilization of business specific transactions, no matter which industry, has proven to open possiblities. Now infomation is made available in both horizontal and vertical directions, internally and externally.

Additionally, industries which are in the midst of the digital processes are now forced to become both providers and consumers of data streams, as the use of APIs is introduced, or should we say gently forced upon them. In the media industry where core business is shuffling data back and forth API’s have been used for many years. And now the use of APIs is becoming a part of the traditional industry´s enterprise IT architecture. In some cases, the traditional way of exchanging data between internal and/or external systems is replaced by APIs. But the first “next step” is usually adding new services through APIs.

The financial instutions of the world are struggling to build stronger and more trust worth relationships with their customers, and in order to do so they need to build applications and services which would not be possible to build without APIs.

If we look at the manufacturing industry, companies have to remain aligned with the increasingly efficient supply chain. In order to do so real-time integration is necessary and that requires the use of APIs.

In the automotive industry “the connected car” reshapes the market completely, this opens up new business opportunities which will introduce new actors (made possible through APIs). This forces the traditional automotive suppliers to “get in the game” in order to be part of the endlessly transforming digitalization.

New beginnings

Undoubtedly APIs provide businesses with a more flexible and agile ways to integrate systems, applications and enable digitial services, both internally and exterally. But in this “gold rush” of information – reliability, perfomance and reciliance has become increasingly important, as systems, applications, and data are added to existing enterprise IT architecture at a very high rate. API’s can be used to avoid the same mistakes that were made when building up the legacy platforms, where new features and systems were added without reflection or plan, in many cases causing an IT maintenance nigthtmare. API usage is a driving force in the media industry where “data” is core to the success of the business. Overall, in most industries around the world, “data” is a service and necessity to the core business. We have now reached the part of the digital evolution when everybody has started using APIs.

In order to get the full effect when introducing APIs in your organization and getting the opportunity to slowly revitalize the legacy platforms bit-by-bit, a clear API strategy, API governance and API management is crucial.

However, keep in mind that one thing does not exclude the other. During your digital transformation you typically need to mix traditional integration with API integration.