Lessons Learned: Moving from APIs and Integrations to Cloud Native Composite Services

Photo by Jason Goodman on Unsplash

As enterprises compete by innovating new digital experiences, there’s more demand than ever to accelerate the delivery of the APIs and services powering these experiences. To realize business outcomes faster, enterprises have had to take a platform approach, which lays the foundation for new value sources that emerge from digital experience engineering.

However, building a digital platform is not the answer alone. A survey by the Harvard Business Review states that 70% of digital transformation efforts fail despite companies investing $1.3 trillion in these efforts.

At a recent IDN webinar, Vice President - Solutions Architecture and Head of Healthcare Practice at WSO2, Mifan Careem, spoke about best practices organizations have used to implement their own digital platforms, including how to move from siloed integration, the importance of supporting the many different teams, and using tools from low-code to pro-code.

In addition, he also shared the following takeaways from those that have succeeded.

Companies that moved on from using siloed applications towards composite ones have experienced success. In the past, enterprises used different vendors to build various layers such as individual programming languages, API gateways, and integration platforms. Now, businesses focus on building composite applications to provide better value for their organization and make digital experiences frictionless.

Successful companies focus on heterogeneous teams. Here, various teams with differing skill sets are made up of different business units. These diverse teams use a mix of low-code, no-code, and pro-code technologies for business applications ranging from day-to-day tasks to more complex use cases. 

Software engineering isn’t limited to just building powerful applications, writing code, and publishing APIs. Other facets include reuse, API marketplaces, testing, version control, debugging, etc. These areas need to be looked at to enable successful digital transformation.

It is important to understand that going cloud-native is a challenging task itself. Various aspects need to be considered at macro and micro levels, including using a public or private cloud, types of teams, and the need to build a center of excellence (CoE). Transformation takes a great deal of time and effort, but when done well, it becomes worthwhile.

To find out more about other lessons learnt during the move from APIs and integrations to cloud native composite services, view the full video here.

Video Source: Enterprise Integration Summit: Integration Developer News 

About the presenter: 

A technology executive, Mifan Careem is the Vice President and Global Head of Solutions Architecture at WSO2, where he heads its global Solutions Architecture and Pre-sales functions whilst playing a corporate leadership role. As part of this role, he leads a team of global architects who have worked across 1500+ integration projects ranging from healthcare to government. Mifan also heads WSO2's Healthcare Solution, owning WSO2’s venture into the healthcare solutions space. Mifan is a global speaker and technology thought leader on API Strategy, Open Source business models and technology for healthcare and humanitarian services. Prior to WSO2, Mifan co-founded Respere - a humanitarian open source technology startup and was a board member and contributor to Sahana, the Open Source Disaster Management System. As part of this, Mifan was involved in cutting- edge humanitarian technology that intersected with healthcare, geospatial data, disaster management, and messaging. Mifan is an advocate and contributor to technology for humanitarian response focusing on the use of open source geospatial solutions in disaster management.