How API led integration changes the clock speed of IT

At a time when digital transformation is an imperative for organizations to stay in the race, Capgemini and MuleSoft have been partnering to increase the success rate of going digital. Jeroen van Essen, Hybrid Integration Expert at Capgemini and Gaurav Chopra, Lead Solution Consultant with MuleSoft throw light how Capgemini, along with MuleSoft, ensures that customers can be on top of their game!

Pursuing Digital Transformation

Businesses are pursuing digital transformation to achieve a step change in their speed, agility, and ability to innovate. This largely rests on their ability to access data in a seamless manner, across the breadth of their organizational ecosystem, as well as their customer and partner and vendor database.

Hybrid Integration approach

Jeroen explains how Capgemini offers customers with an assessment to understand their current positioning and then develop and deploy a digital strategy towards becoming a game-changer. “Let’s say our client wants to offer customized services to their end-customers and are focused on customer-centricity: their key areas of interest would then be creating new apps and new web portals, new ways of marketing, and new business cases, new ways of delivering business value. Or, for that matter, let’s assume our client is in the agricultural market: their area of interest would center around be providing the farmers with the weather data and data about the soil they’re farming on in combination with the products they are using to enable them to optimize performance. In both these cases, what is striking is the fact that various data systems are involved, which need to work together in a seamless manner – which is what we call “hybrid integration!”

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This has triggered the need for an API and hybrid integration approach, which according to Capgemini’s latest client research,  Unlocking the Hybrid Integration Dividend, reduces time to market, accelerates the adoption of new technologies, and creates new revenue streams, thereby enabling superior revenue growth. Towards this end, Capgemini offers clients an end-to-end suite of hybrid integration services, in collaboration with MuleSoft, which provides one of the most widely used integration platforms.

Agility, speed and innovation

Gaurav Chopra, spoke about how Capgemini and MuleSoft have been collaborating since 2015 to offer clients with an on-premises, cloud, and hybrid integration platform based on open-source API connectivity. This, not only enables them to can connect applications and data but also to adapt agility, speed, and innovation in developing and deploying new products, systems, and processes.

300% productivity increase at Unilever

Both Jeroen and Gaurav spoke about a brilliant example of how our collaboration went on to offer one of our leading retail clients, Unilever, with a solution that enabled a 300% productivity increase!

“In a fast-moving agile world, where innovative disruptors were gaining ground, Unilever decided to focus on product development as well as a ramp up of their technology. While new product development, right from innovation to research and development, and build and test could be achieved in a matter of six months, the rollout of the new product would often take 12 to 18 months owing to the multitude of disparate systems at work. At this stage, MuleSoft introduced a unified platform and in collaboration with Capgemini offered Unilever a is fast and agile framework that included everything from designing APIs or integration framework, to testing them (mock testing and unit testing both) and then doing a complete roll-over into production,” pointed out Gaurav.

Jeroen further emphasizes the need of a rationalized integration landscape and a flexible API strategy, and stated how Capgemini’s Center for Enablement approach was key in API management. “We work in collaboration with the customers’ architect team and business analysts and via the C4E provide guidelines and a central point of contact for all projects, and also evangelize the concept of putting an integration platform at the center of all IT projects.”

Focus on impact for customers

An ideal digital strategy for organization rests on gaining competitive advantage by unlocking business value from new technologies. And Jeroen signs off by underlining that “Most organizations are focusing on the technical capabilities and functionalities that each platform provides, but to have real impact with customers it is also important to change the way of working and start perceiving the integration platform as the central part within your application landscape. And it is thanks to MuleSoft that we are able to offer our clients with an end-to-end solution around the integration activity that enables them to be two steps ahead, digitally!”

If you’d like to know more about how modernized API and hybrid integration can enable you to adopt digital transformation to proceed at pace, you can get in touch with Jeroen van Essen or download the report!