Accelerate New Digital Business Models
Application integration is a key enabler for your digital transformation and IT modernization goals. Integration platforms and APIs help you transition from legacy systems to more agile cloud applications.
Agile cloud-native integration platforms and APIs are fundamental elements of your digital platform architecture. By minimizing the time and overhead of integration, your IT teams can better focus on delivering exceptional customer experiences, digital products via APIs, and the operational efficiencies needed for digital transformation.
20 Years of Industry-Recognized API and Integration Expertise
We have been working in the integration and API space for 20 years and have award-winning partnerships with the leading software vendors in the field. When we work with clients, we draw upon a wealth of intellectual property and experience gained from countless engagements.
Forrester Research has recognized us among the top API and integration strategy and delivery service providers in the following reports:
- Forrester Wave: Specialist API Strategy and Delivery Service Providers, Q2, 2019
- Forrester Now Tech: Application Modernization and Migration Services, Q1 2019
- Forrester Now Tech: Top Microservices Strategy and Delivery Service Providers, Q1 2018
- Forrester Now Tech: Integration Strategy and Delivery Service Providers, Q1 2018
- Forrester Now Tech: API Strategy and Delivery Service Providers, Q1 2018
Establishing a world-class integration and API program requires an efficient organization that promotes collaboration and developer self-service. A lightweight governance model is needed that encourages integration of asset creation and consumption. Integration technology is also necessary to support the development lifecycle, address use cases, and support hybrid deployment options.
API Quick Start
Our API Quick Start offering addresses these complex requirements with service options that include strategy, platform architecture and selection, organization and governance, lifecycle development and DevOps, and operations and managed services.
Integration Platform Architecture and Approach
As many companies move toward a modern architecture that encompasses hybrid cloud, mobility, and the Internet of Things (IoT), the need for application integration becomes pervasive. To address these needs, our first step is an assessment of current integration capabilities and the desired state of people, processes, and technology. We look at integration competency in the context of the corporate vision and specific project requirements for integration.
Assessment and Recommendations
We assess your current-state integration through a series of interviews using a well-defined, fast-paced workshop agenda. We then perform a gap analysis against industry best practices and produce a set of prioritized and actionable recommendations. These set the stage to further align people, processes, and technology with the future-state vision for integration and APIs.
Organization and Governance
We work with you to define an optimal organizational structure for integration in the context of your enterprise’s requirements, culture, and skill sets. We facilitate organizational structure workshops to review organization and governance options and then define structures and processes that will work best in your environment.
We collaborate to establish the workflows, tasks, deliverables, and policies needed for integration and API governance by leveraging proprietary templates to speed the overall creation and adoption of integration governance. The desired outcome is to create a lightweight governance model that promotes reuse while ensuring business and operational SLAs are met. We can then leverage our software partners to automate API governance via API management, developer portals, and DevOps tools.
Architecture and Standards
From an integration architecture perspective, we assess your current requirements through a series of workshops to determine gaps and make product recommendations. We look at integration architecture holistically as a set of tools to integrate on-premises applications, cloud applications, data, and business processes.
The activities needed to establish the modern integration platform include:
- Define integration reference architecture
- Assess the current state of integration and gaps
- Product selection for tool gaps Stand up the integration platform
- Define standards and guidance
- Conduct a pilot project to prove technology and standards
- Create and catalog reusable assets
Our baseline architecture includes integration reference architecture, platform implementation guidelines, and best practices and standards that we can customize to meet your needs.
Platform Software Selection
We also have tools to help with software selection, including vendor profiles, requirements surveys, RFP templates, demo scripts, and scorecards. We can make recommendations less formally based on our experience, the architecture best fit, and our partner network.
API Platform and Lifecycle
The goal of a robust API lifecycle is to create a rich developer experience via a developer portal, provide architecture guidance, standards, best practices, and automate the entire lifecycle. The API lifecycle should include a collaborative API design process, DevOps-style automated build, test and deploy, and a rich API management platform. Our partnerships, best practices, and experienced staff can help implement the API platform and lifecycle.
DevOps
Our DevOps practice team is comprised of experienced developers, Agile coaches, system engineers, build/release engineers, and cloud automation gurus. Our Agile methodology combines DevOps tools, processes, and culture to enable continuous API integration and deployment within a rapid release API lifecycle.
Our API DevOps guidelines address testing and build processes, pipelines, run-time monitoring, and CI/CD toolchains including deployments of API management configurations and proxies. Our API DevOps guidelines, reference architecture, and best practices establish end-to-end DevOps capabilities for APIs.
Planning and Roadmap
The complexity of integration governance, architecture and standards, skills and technology gaps, and project demands drive the need to define an implementation roadmap in terms of people, processes, and technology. We often work with our clients to define an integration roadmap to mature integration delivery, operations, governance, and technology. To rapidly mature integration capabilities, it is often desirable to break the problem down into roadmap tracks with goals, milestones, and KPIs for each track.
Next Steps on Your IT Modernization Journey
We bring intellectual property and experience to the problems associated with building a world-class integration program. We have a well-defined process and many templates, but can customize workshop agendas, architecture, processes, and standards to address your unique situation. We also offer the quick-start approach in separate engagements – for example, we can start with the integration assessment as a standalone offering. Our approach is somewhat prescriptive, but we have the flexibility to deliver outcomes that are truly unique to you.
