San Francisco, 20 February 2017. After an awesome opening ceremony with lots of drums and rhythms, Sanjiva Weerawarana Ph.D. – CEO and Founder WSO2, presented WSO2’s vision for an Agile Digital Transformation. Yenlo, silver sponsor of the conference and premier partner of WSO2, was present and report back to you.
Customers are Connected with IoT, Mobile Apps and more…
With every human expected to own some 20 or more connected devices by the year 2020, the Internet of Things (IoT) is one phenomenon we can’t ignore. We will soon have trillions of connected devices.
IoT, Mobile Apps, or even better: connected customers forces companies to streamline the customer experiences, the heart of digital business. At there lays the connection with operational excellence. IoT and mobile apps brings speed to operations and processes that, ultimately, lead to a better customer experience.
We should also explore collected information from these IoT devices and mobile apps to better understand how customers interact with different platforms and channels by directly tapping into data from the devices and mobile apps. These insights are reframing the way we do business, from re-active to pro-active and predictive, and are increasingly changing how consumers behave and what they expect from you.
So what do we mean with the Digital Transformation?
As mentioned by WSO2, the Digital Technology is driving companies towards three key elements:
- Adding digital components to their products, and the products become completely digital products;
- Engaging with customers through new digital experiences;
- Enhancing digital operations for monitoring, control and intelligence.
By that companies need:
- Sustained capacity for business creativity and digital innovation;
- Rapid and iterative development processes;
- A technology platform supporting creative and development processes.
And that is exact what Yenlo delivers and implements with the WSO2 technology stack as our backbone.
We need APIs, Integration, Identities, Analytics and IoT
So what do we need to do to connect our back-office information and engage better with our customers? What do we need to do to collect more relevant information from our customers and use it in such way we are able to deliver better quality services? Here it is:
- Build agility with an API platform of reuseable business functionality;
- Deploy integration tools to build new products quickly through integration;
- Manage identities and do not neglect security;
- Capture analytics and build in smarts throught Artificial Intelligence;
- Leverage the spread of IoT devices.
And this is how it should look like from an API perspective:
The step-by-step approach:
So, what do we need to do to connect our back-office information and engage better with our customers? What do we need to do to collect more relevant information from our customers and use it in such way we are able to deliver better quality services? The step-by-step approach:
Step 1: Open up your back-end systems with services
Step 2: Expose your services as APIs to the outside world
Step 3: Integrate (Mobile) Apps and Partners to your APIs
Step 4: Invite 3rd party Delivers Community
Step 5: Collect statistics, analyze data and adjust your customer services
The question is, how and where to start? Well, from a technical point of view, I would advise to start with a low cost implementation of an integration platform which is capable to integrate your back-end systems, manage APIs in a proper way, and analyze the data collected from the usage of these APIs. API management with the WSO2 integration platform, the only fully open source API manager, is just doing that.
During the opening speech of Sanjiva he addressed specifically: ‘It is not just a technology thing, but all about business. We as WSO2 will transform as company as well. From middleware to open source technology for agile digital transformation‘, in my opnion spot on!
Securing your APIs
Just open up your business and invite the 3rd party developer community is not a wise decission. Securing your customer data and business assets is crucial. So, how to secure your api’s in the right way? Making use of the industry standards OAuth and SAML is important. Applying these standards makes that your api’s and therefore your digital business is adopted by the majority of your business partners and 3rd party developers. And that broad adoption makes your digital business grow like never before. If you need an even higher level of security, you can easily extend your API platform with a strong identity and access management solution like the WSO2 Identity Server. Doing so, allows you to add federated access management to your API’s.
Go Digital Now!
But, for many companies, it is still very difficult to transform to a digital business with pro-active and predictive processes in place. So, that is why an agile digital transformation approach, is the right approach. In such an approach you put all the building blocks together and step-by-step you start implementing to open up your digital assets. Key here is to adjust and reframing your business processes based on collected intel.
WSO2’s vision for an Agile Digital Transformation is aligned with our Go Digital and Digital Transformation approach whereby overcoming the, what we call, ‘IT Delivery Gap’ is key. Read how to transform to a digital company with API management and Integration solutions in our free White Paper. Read here all annoucements made during the WSO2Con US 2017.
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