Solution Use Cases in App Modernization
Use case opportunities across industries
how to identify opportunities to implement use cases, projects, and programs onto the Apigee-Edge platform. If you find these kinds of initiatives at your clients, please contact the Google Apigee team to help you qualify and pursue these joint opportunities.
Challenge
Application UI Modernization
AppSheet
Enable everyone in your organization to build and extend applications without coding.
Enable everyone in your organization to build and extend applications with no-code app development with AppSheet.
API Management Use Cases
Desire to share APIs with developers faster
Partner developers, customer developers, and internal developers. In 2016 this became a common use case that resulted in clients selecting Apigee-Edge. As requirements matured beyond just exposing APIs to consuming APIs, clients came to realize that the key is to accelerate developer on-boarding. The customizable and self-serve developer portal bundled within Apigee Edge enables developers to rapidly find, test, and understand APIs, thus dramatically accelerating the consumption of APIs. Apigee’s customers are now using Apigee-Edge to build a developer ecosystem and increase developer consumption of their APIs.
Need for a developer portal
Closely related to a client’s desires to share APIs with developers faster, is the practical decision to provide a developer portal as the means to share those APIs and foster a strong developer ecosystem for internal or external (partners, customers) developers. A standalone developer portal will however be challenged to integrate with the client’s API production methods (possibly fragmented). The standalone developer portal can offer a silo of visibility that is limited to the activity within the portal, while lacking the visibility that spans across applications, APIs (including payloads for business analytics in addition to operational analytics), and the backend systems. That’s where Google’s Apigee-Edge platform is able to differentiate itself and why many clients selected Apigee-Edge, a fully integrated APIM platform vs. investing time and resources to try to piece together a platform. The world’s leading companies (AT&T, SAP, Fujitsu, and many others) evaluated build vs. buy and selected Apigee-Edge.
Going Mobile First
(developing mobile B2B, B2C, and B2E applications)
Many companies are struggling to rapidly develop mobile applications. Developing mobile applications requires optimizing APIs and data for different devices and different networks, securing data outside the firewall, managing incoming API traffic, and caching data to improve performance. Apigee-Edge provides 30 out-of-the-box policies that make mobilizing your data, APIs and backend applications fast and easy.
Visibility across the entire digital value chain
Google’s Apigee-Edge platform provides granular operational analytics from the client application (ie: client clicks, request response times, errors, etc.), through every hop along software stack, all the to the backend services. In addition to API operational metrics, Apigee-Edge collects business analytics from the API’s data (payloads), application developer activity, and API production and monetization.
Creating omni-channel connected eCommerce
As retailers revamp their e-commerce experiences, many are realizing that the optimal consumer experience is unified across interaction channels (i.e., mobile, web, kiosk, etc.). For this unified, omni-channel experience to materialize, APIs must be versioned and consumed quickly by application developers. Doing this requires an integrated platform that allows the rapid versioning of APIs, with a tightly integrated developer portal to allow developers to rapidly find, test, and understand APIs.
Need to develop digital applications faster
Participating and competing in the digital economy requires developing applications quickly, at the pace the market demands - no one wants to miss the market. Being the “first-mover” is a critical and in many cases appears to be an insurmountable advantage when launching a digital-platform-business where it’s critical to achieve critical mass of value producers and value consumers (consider Uber, Airbnb, and LinkedIn) .
Need digital applications to operate at massive scale
Scaling elastically with minimal or no impact to performance and reliability.
Google’s Apigee-Edge platform was architected and built to operate at massive internet-scale traffic volumes and to scale elastically with minimal to no impact to performance (i.e. response time latency) and reliability. The public cloud instance of Google’s Apigee-Edge is currently processing close to 400 billion calls per year with 99.99 reliability - while scaling 4X during Black Friday while maintaining all customer SLAs.
Moving to Microservices
Nearly 70% of organizations claim to be either using or investigating microservices, (research from NGINX). Microservices are implemented using a variety of microservices stacks like Kubernetes, Netflix OSS, and Mesos, depending on client needs. All these microservices use web APIs as a mechanism to communicate with one another. There’s a challenging side effect, however. It’s common for clients to inadvertently create silos with inconsistencies in security, visibility, documentation, and governance as they move to microservices. Many of the APIs that connect microservices are not secured consistently across the organization, and may not be accompanied by standardized documentation, or access control mechanisms. These microservices and associated APIs are often difficult to reuse, analyze, or even to discover for use.
Moving to cloud or hybrid-multi-cloud
As clients move their workloads to the cloud or build new cloud-native applications, how will they connect them with other apps and data that still reside in your data centers, or in other clouds? The de facto standard to connect cloud workloads is the REST API. To get the most out of your cloud deployments, there’s a host of best practices around managing APIs in the cloud world, addressing the challenges faced in moving to cloud, managing security, governance, and visibility. Apigee-Edge plays a vital role in managing these APIs.
Overhauling and future-proofing the enterprise software stack
Many companies struggle with how to “become digital”, often thinking they need to upgrade and update their backend systems, and build new software stacks in preparation of becoming “digital” – sample elements of digital are: going Mobile, launching IOT initiatives, becoming more data driven, and operating at massive scale with millions of users and billions of transactions that occur outside the enterprise firewall that must be secured. One of the core values of the Apigee-Edge platform is enabling companies to “go digital” while minimizing the impact on backend systems, actually protecting and buffering backend systems from unnecessary or malicious traffic, and sometimes eliminating the need to update and upgrade the backends altogether. The Apigee-Edge platform enables this at a fraction of the cost and time
Extract new value from existing company assets through digital
We are seeing companies in every industry that are evaluating how they can participate in digital to gain new value from their existing assets (both digital and physical). This value can take many forms, including greater customer or partner “stickiness,” differentiation or competitive advantage of their existing products or services, new revenue streams, and many more. However many clients struggle with how to move beyond just “exposing” APIs, to how to drive API consumption by application developers and ultimately users (the ultimate measure of success). Many clients use Apigee-Edge to create vibrant developer ecosystems (both internal and external), rapidly creating the digital experiences that users consume and realize new value.
Transforming your company into a platform digital business
Clearly the above collection of client initiatives and use cases are steps along the path to becoming a digital business. Often we see clients taking these steps as disjointed independent projects. However, more and more we’re seeing clients taking these steps as part of a cohesive plan to transform their company into a digital business. The common thread to all these initiatives and becoming a digital business is the vital role of APIs and the need to manage APIs as products in a unified consistent way across the enterprise. Over the past 5 years Apigee has helped hundreds of customers drive business results with their API programs.
Struggling to move to agile development
While many companies desire and are working to move toward an agile development methodology, many are struggling with the “how” to empower their teams to develop applications at the pace the business demands. Becoming “agile” goes beyond reorganizing the teams and adopting a different methodology – it also requires decoupling the development and maintenance of the “digital systems of engagement” from the development and maintenance of “legacy systems of record” (i.e.: ESBs, CRM, ERP, dBases, etc. – the combination of systems commonly referred to as the “backend”).
Mergers and Acquisition - Accelerate Time to Value
Most (70% to 90%) mergers and acquisitions struggle or fail (numerous studies including Harvard Business Review). The CEO departed within two years in 42% of the cases where the merger failed to meet expectations, (Reference Booz-Allen & Hamilton). Obviously accelerating time to value of the merger is vital. Business objectives of mergers typically include customer acquisition, access to markets, services, revenue streams, and cost reduction through greater efficiencies. However, there are numerous technology “gating factors” to realizing the merger’s value.
Investing in BD/BI solutions
Anecdotal feedback from the leadership of some of our customers is that their investments in BD/BI have resulted in nice graphs used in boardroom meetings. While management review of data is important, the way to unlock the value of your client’s investments in BD/BI in a digital world is by making their insights actionable in the form of applications and APIs that can adapt at the speed the context requires. Digital experiences and applications that adapt based on BD/BI insights are a powerful tool for improving the user experience and possibly altering user behavior. The Apigee platform is designed to ingest insights from a number of BI sources and enable APIs and applications to adapt at the pace dictated by the insights – in weeks, days, or near real-time.
Application Modernization
Most companies today are planning or in the process of transforming into a “digital company”. Some common questions arise - “is my technology stack ready to go digital”. In terms of our credentials with customers using our product as part of an application modernization initiative, we have the following Apigee customer examples to share. Apigee enables you to create APIs and manage them as products for the benefit of application developers who need to use your services. "API Products" offer different capabilities and levels of service, with consumption managed by Apigee. Istio is an open source framework for connecting, securing, and managing microservices, especially services that are hosted in a Kubernetes cluster.
Partner Horizontal Market Enablers
SAP + GCP + Apigee Overview
Leverage Apigee API Management to modernize access to your SAP systems
Apigee API Management is Google Cloud's product to manage all interfaces to customer's backend systems and make them universally accessible in a secure manner.
Learn more about the solution below and how customers who want to modernize access to their SAP landscape with Google Cloud can benefit from the different features like API proxy development, security or monetization.
For some sample use cases, make sure to also check out the list of Apigee references.
- Apigee API Management for SAP data sheet explaining ROI values and use cases for enabling SAP services with an API Management Platform intended for C-level executives and business executives.
- API Management for SAP presentation on the Google/Apigee impact in the industry, solutions and clients.
- Business value of Google Cloud for SAP environments.
- Data sheet of Operational values for API Management for SAP
Transforming Customer Care w/ CCAI and Apigee
Elevating CCAI fulfillment, caller experience & omni-channel customer care
- Virtual agents. For both voice & text, Dialogflow distills the customer’s natural language into intents (eg: pay-phone-bill) & parameters (eg: bill-amount: “300”) -- then hands that information to an API so that the desired action (paying a bill, in this case) can be performed. We call this handoff process fulfillment. Apigee greatly simplifies the development of these fulfillment APIs.
- Agent assist. Some calls will continue to be fielded by traditional, human agents. CCAI parses the call in real-time and - based on the perceived needs of the caller - presents contextual information to the human agent that may assist in serving the caller. This information must be retrieved, via API, from the enterprise. Apigee simplifies the development of these APIs, as well.
Customers will, one way or another, attempt to address the API challenges that come with grafting a dynamic, AI-powered solution (CCAI) onto their existing infrastructure. Some will employ a competitive API platform (eg: from Amazon). Some will write custom code, to bridge the gap. Pairing CCAI and Apigee addresses a number of key challenges for customers that go unaddressed with other approaches.
- Apigee API Management + CCAI data sheet explaining ROI values and use cases for enabling customer care AI with an API Management Platform intended for C-level executives and business executives.
- API Management + CCAI presentation on the Google/Apigee solution.
- CCAI Solution and use case definitions.
Partner Vertical Industry Accelerators
Financial Industry
-A financial industry banking data sheet explaining industry issues, trends and solutions intended for C-level executives and business executives.
-Financial Banking presentation on the Google/Apigee impact in the industry, solutions and clients.
-Financial Open Banking presentation
-Video of financial customer stories
-Webinar discussing best practices on how to build an Open Banking Strategy solution along with Volt Bank sharing their Digital journey.
-Webinar on Open Banking drivers for APIs on the topics of; on getting started with Open Banking, on technical solutions at Google Cloud Apigee and on platform solutions at Google Cloud Apigee
Healthcare Industry
-A healthcare industry data interoperability data sheet explaining CMS/UNC compliance requirements, and solutions intended for C-level executives and business executives.
-Healthcare presentation on Digital Trends in Healthcare with Apigee which covers challenges in the industry, drivers and solutions centered around improving patients care.
-Healthcare executive summary on challenges and solutions.
-Video of healthcare customer use-cases
-Webinar discussing digital trends in healthcare and clients Digital journey.
-API usage and use cases of customers in healthcare
Telecommunications Industry
-A telecommunications data sheet explaining API enablement efficiencies, how the industry is transforming, and solutions intended for C-level executives and business executives.
-Telecom presentation on Digital Trends in telecommunications with Apigee which covers challenges in the industry, drivers and solutions centered around improving services.
-Telecom guide on identifying and Apigee opportunity..
-Video of telecommunication customer use-cases
-Executive presentation on 5G enablement and mapping the Digital journey.
-API usage and use cases of customers in telecommunications
Retail Industry
-A retail data sheet explaining API enablement efficiencies, how the industry is transforming, and solutions intended for C-level executives and business executives.
-Telecom presentation on Digital Trends in telecommunications with Apigee which covers challenges in the industry, drivers and solutions centered around improving services.
-Retail guide on identifying and qualifying Apigee opportunity..
-Video of retail customer use-cases
-Executive presentation on goto market strategy and enablement with Apigee and GCP.
-API usage and use cases of customers in telecommunications