The enterprise applications being used to engage with customers, employees and partners have changed significantly. Technologies like AI/ML, IoT, RPA, SaaS, and big data are providing robust platforms which unleash the real value of data and unlock new revenue streams, enabling businesses to innovate faster and better serve their customers.
But organisations need to be ready to integrate with these new and emerging technologies, so they can meet market disruptions and changing demands with ease. Ensuring business integration is part of your IT strategy is key to addressing this issue, but exactly what benefits does an integration platform offer?
Be more agile
Your business needs a modern, agile approach to integration. The right integration platform should enable you to empower extended teams to create integrations, leverage and reuse capabilities, and increase overall productivity. Well-integrated, flexible and agile IT can help organisations identify opportunities faster and easily adapt to disruptions and shifts in the market. New technologies offer powerful tools so businesses can meet demand, identify opportunities, and innovate faster than before. But to do so, businesses need to integrate these new technologies with APIs.
An API-led approach to delivering IT projects ensures you stay on time and budget, with an infrastructure which is designed for change and meets your needs. To transform how your business operates, you must connect SaaS applications to each other and to your systems. Out-of-the-box connectors, integration templates, and a drag-and-drop design environment can make SaaS connectivity quick and easy and increase time-to-value. An API-led integration platform can enable you to transform your customer experiences, liberate resources so you can innovate more quickly, seamlessly integrate IoT technologies, and achieve business agility.
Increase productivity
Across your IT team
To improve productivity, organisations need to consider the principles of franchising. Franchisers build reusable assets that are then packaged for self-service to drive scale and innovation - so the next time a new Burger King opens, the store already has reusable assets - from store plans to billing and payment.
To achieve this, adopt an API-led approach to integration. With this approach, every asset and connection is a managed, modern API that is discoverable through self-service, giving your organisation full control. The reusability and discoverability of assets means you can change the way your business delivers projects, as well as the speed they’re delivered.
Across your business
Organisations need to reengineer processes and streamline operations if they want to drive significant efficiencies and cut costs, across departments. Automated processes, integrated services, and secure data sharing - across employees, customers and partners – mean you can boost collaboration and productivity, while capturing all data sent between systems in real-time. This approach to integration will give you invaluable insights to help uncover opportunities and potential bottlenecks, while saving substantial amounts of time and effort across your organisation.
Enhance customer experiences
If you want to create great customer experiences, you need a 360-degree view of each customer, reflecting every communication and activity a customer has had with your business. Disparate systems that contain customer information – such as ERPs, CRMs, sales reporting - must be integrated to facilitate a holistic customer view.
The best integration platforms allow any organisation to connect disparate technologies and previous integrations in a unique fashion to drive business innovation. Strategic API integrations can map information from a wide variety of systems to expose insights into what customers actually want and how products are really used. Enable your organisation to target customers with the right message at the right time to enhance customer experiences, fostering loyalty and improving retention, using integrated systems and real-time data.
Plan for future growth
Organisations need fast and efficient ways to implement the latest technologies and seamlessly integrate them with applications. You can deal with the unscaled adoption of new IT and applications and improve your organisation’s ability to connect everything, by viewing integration as a strategic capability and a key business enabler.
With an API-led approach, you can be sure that you have the capabilities to effectively integrate new technologies as they grow and mature. Whatever your approach, the biggest consideration should centre around the long-term viability of any integration solution, and whether it has the capabilities to keep up with the pace of change in today’s digitally powered landscape.