For the past few years digital transformation and the associated changes in relation to culture and technology have dominated many business leaders’ agendas. This trend looks set to continue.
To gain a professional insight, Digital Journal reached out to Brian Otten, Digital Transformation Catalyst at Axway and to William McKinney, Senior Director of Platform Marketing.
Shift from API production to API consumption
According to McKinney: “2023 will witness widespread growth in partner and public application programming interfaces (APIs) in addition to internal ones. This move from beyond the enterprise boundary marks a shift from API production to API consumption. Additionally, we will see a shift of APIs from technical interfaces to be more aligned with business functions. Businesses will now focus on results derived from API services for direct or indirect monetization. Lastly, in 2023, Companies will reduce the total number of APIs they share externally as they shift to API products instead of API interfaces.”
Otten adds: “Digital marketplaces will shift the focus on the consumption of digital assets rather than provision and integration objectives – this is a shift from a technology strategy to a business one. The shift to product thinking and culture is finally happening, reflected in team organization and change management. According to a survey by Gartner, 85 percent of organizations have adopted, or plan to adopt, a product-centric application delivery model in the future. This will make it easier to adopt digital marketplaces and enable raw integration assets to be packaged as valuable business capabilities.”
This means, notes Otten: “Organizations have latent value whose potential currently can’t be leveraged because capabilities have been baked into application features and logic that can’t be reused. With digital marketplaces, web APIs can serve as the front door to composable digital products and services with the possibility of consistent subscription experiences.”
Roll over DevOps, here is Platform Engineering
Otten’s take on development is with moving beyond the now mainstream DevOps and towards new approaches to change: “Organizations have been able to make huge strides towards the goals of DevOps and the ability for technical engineering teams to deploy and run their applications end-to-end truly.”
There’s more to consider, says Otten: “Sometimes, though, this has been the result of single, more advanced teams forging ahead and cobbling together their DevOps tooling and practices within a CI-CD pipeline approach to speed up life cycles and introduce automation of delivery.”
Furthermore: “The evidence of this is a recent Humanitec study that investigated trends in DevOps adoption and found that 52.9 percent of companies have dedicated DevOps teams but that development teams are still entirely reliant on these teams, increasing the risk of bottlenecks and slowing adoption of DevOps.”
So, what is likely to change? Platform engineering is an emerging technology approach that could accelerate the delivery of applications by improving developer experience and productivity by providing self-service capabilities with automated infrastructure operations.
Otten predicts: “I predict that 2023 will be the year when Platform Engineering brings self-serve DevOps to the masses through internal developer platforms that bridge developers and unblock operations obstacles. Platform Engineering will also make it easier to measure the delivery and quality gains that are quite difficult to measure when shadow operations or disjointed DevOps efforts are all you have.”
