API integration becomes an enterprise priority

Why API integration?

"As new applications come in and are being introduced to consumers, adoption can skyrocket quickly to tens of millions of users," said Matthew David, emerging technologies digital product owner at QBE Insurance. "With API integration, your delivery team can react quickly to make your applications available to them."

While API integration is new to some companies, the technology behind it is seasoned and mature, David said. The technology in APIs has its history in web services, so there's solid API technology that allows you to create services that you can share across systems. Now, API management platforms can automate API integration tasks, create API catalogs and more.

Matthew David

The pre-built integration templates in API integration products bring quick connectivity between previously siloed cloud applications. These packaged integrations also help with self-service deployment for line-of-business employees, increasing the speed and reducing labor costs of integration.

Those attributes led Humantelligence, which offers an AI-driven recruiting and culture-analytics platform, to adopt API integration. Juan Luis Betancourt, Humantelligence's CEO, sought automated integration capabilities to connect the company's app environments with customers' cloud and homegrown apps, particularly their applicant-tracking applications.

After evaluating five products, Betancourt implemented Jitterbit Harmony iPaaS. This API integration platform helps his company quickly connect SaaS, on-premises and cloud applications. "The iPaaS solution provides the built-in integrations and automated tools we need to navigate the complexities of API integration," he said.

Without API integration, Betancourt's team had to build integrations with customers' homegrown on-premises and new cloud applications. With a staff of only five developers, doing just one such integration projection would freeze company development and certain operations for two weeks or more. Customer-support improvements, feature-release planning and other critical functions had to be put on hold.

"It was really crippling for us to do integrations ourselves," Betancourt said.

Extend APIs to event-driven integration

Massimo Pezzini

About 50% of managed APIs will support event-driven IT by 2020, according to Gartner. These event-driven APIs are part of the technology mix that will help a business achieve a competitive advantage with real-time integration. "Event-driven integration technologies help businesses sense and respond quickly to what's going on with customers, the industry [and] the market," Pezzini said. Event-driven APIs will supplement and not replace RESTful API request-and-response technologies.

Developers will continue to build increasingly event-driven API models, notably using a call-back model that gives an API an address for where to deliver a result.

"Being able to handle business events more effectively and more expediently is a critical process in solution architectures," Heffner said.

In event-driven integration, systems communicate to recognize events and respond by instigating actions in other systems and applications.

Randy Heffner

A typical example is closing an airplane door, which Chatterjee called "both a business and a technical event." Via integration with systems' APIs within the airline, air-traffic control and other entities concerned, this event can trigger delivery of data about flight timelines.

"When a business event gets captured, it immediately triggers the business rules through an API," Chatterjee said.

If there's a flight delay, for example, the event signals APIs for the re-scheduling and re-rostering of staff on connecting flights -- activities that will get pushed to central computing and then to notification devices, such as smartphones and tablets. This was done with messaging services in the past, but can be more effectively done via API-based systems, complex event processing engines, in- data and messaging services.

Integration is a transformation project

As businesses craft more flexible application integration strategies, they should recognize that integration is not just a technology play. Instead, an enterprise integration strategy is part of businesses' digital transformation initiatives.

"Look at how to use integration capabilities within the organization to fuel growth and transformation rather than being more like an underpinning of technology," Chatterjee said.