Putting Integration and APIs at the Center of Your Digital Strategy

5 minute read | 31 May 2017

By Boomi

Integration and API management are at the heart of digital transformation. Unless data and applications are rapidly and seamlessly integrated, digital transformation will fall far short of strategic objectives. Yet both integration and API management are sometimes an afterthought as organizations map out and implement strategies for digital transformation.

That’s a recipe for failure.

The rapid deployment of cloud and mobile applications to drive digital transformation has raised the stakes for integration. In our hyperspeed business world, integration needs to be fast, flexible, cost-efficient, and future-proof to drive the evolution of your digital enterprise.

Moving Beyond Traditional Approaches to Integration

If you’re still relying on the integration techniques of yesteryear, you can bet that a more agile competitor is quickly scaling up its IT infrastructure for driving digital transformation.

Today, we see more IT leaders coming to grips with an inconvenient truth: Custom-coding and on-premise integration middleware are too slow and costly to keep up with business demands for speed and agility.

  • Traditional integration isn’t built to handle the growth of cloud endpoints across the digital business
  • Existing integration architectures aren’t geared for rapid change and evolution
  • Legacy integration middleware requires expensive, specialized resources
  • Custom-coding requires significant time for development and maintenance

A key to successful digital transformation is to think of integration as a strategic capability, not just a tool. Integration should be at the center of initiatives to enrich the customer experience, improve operational efficiency, and capitalize on analytics, big data, mobile and IoT.

To qualify as a strategic capability, integration needs three key characteristics:

Native Cloud

A cloud-based integration platform as a service (iPaaS) aligns with the cloud-first strategy pursued by most organizations. It’s important for your enterprise to make the distinction between a native cloud integration platform and one that’s “cloud-washed” — an on-premise system simply moved to a hosted environment.

Unified

An iPaaS like Boomi supplies multiple capabilities in a unified environment, including integration, API management, master data management (MDM), EDI, and workflow orchestration. That supports “economies of skill,” eliminating the need for your IT team to learn multiple tools. A common, centralized platform speeds IT projects and reduces project overhead.

Low code

The term “low code” describes application or integration development that eliminates or greatly reduces manual coding. Boomi pioneered low-code integration when we introduced the world’s first iPaaS in 2007. Today, Boomi delivers more than 200 branded connectors and provides proven connectivity to more than 1,000 unique endpoints.

Integration and API Management as One

The tight coupling of our core integration and API management capabilities in the Boomi platform provides a host of efficiencies. Boomi can help your organization improve its agility by reducing manual work and eliminating the need for third-party API management tools.

APIs are an essential element for digital transformation. They help organizations introduce new functionality and seamless experiences across hybrid IT environments. And API management is on the rise in a broad range of use cases, from linking mobile apps to back-end systems to liberating mission-critical data from decades-old legacy systems.

With Boomi API Management, developers can provide an API layer on top of Boomi integration processes. It exposes applications and data sources for internal use by employees or external use by partners and customers.

The capacity to handle both integrations and APIs in a unified environment aligns with digital transformation itself — faster, less costly, and more agile.

Built From the Cloud Up

Boomi’s comprehensive API Management offering provides such capabilities as third-party authentication to govern user access to applications and the ability to control data flows. Overall, Boomi gives you the ability to:

  • Create. Configure APIs from scratch or from existing Boomi integration processes through in a web-based visual interface.
  • Publish. Deploy APIs with comprehensive security and authentication, for use on-premise or in the cloud.
  • Manage. Use a central console to manage the full API lifecycle, including testing, versioning, and monitoring.

We built our core integration and API management platform from the cloud up for business agility. So, instead of a months-long integration ordeal, your developers can be done in weeks or days. You can be exchanging data and driving workflows today — not sometime next quarter. Meanwhile, your developers can move on to other projects in the pipeline with tangible business impact. Because, let’s face it, no one wants to spend more time and money on integration than is absolutely necessary.

For a look at how Boomi can help your business succeed with digital transformation, contact our integration experts today.