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Companies of all shapes and sizes, across all industries, need Integration Trailblazers. An Integration Trailblazer can be anyone — a financial analyst, an architect, an admin, a marketer, an engineer — looking to get smart on APIs, grow their career, and transform the customer experience. Integration powers a connected world. BMW, Ashley Stewart, and HSBC are great examples of how this API-led approach can help you meet the needs of your customers, and business, all while increasing speed, internal agility, and driving innovation scale. The innovation doesn’t stop there. Here are the 10 Integration Trailblazer stories to inspire YOU.

#1: BMW expands the ultimate driving experience to the road

BMW is delivering the ultimate driving experience, but it’s also reimagining the customer service experience. How are they doing all this faster, so they can also invest in their other goals such as electrification? The vision for BMW’s IT team is to transform the customer experience with APIs. Happier customer service agents, happier customers, happier business. Check out BMW’s video below to learn more.

#2: HSBC builds an open banking ecosystem 

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Banks have a choice of how they respond to open banking regulations. They can either view it as a constraint or they can see it as an opportunity. HSBC saw open banking as a huge opportunity. They built a digital banking platform that can securely unlock access to core banking products to enable collaboration with partners, accelerate innovation, and open new revenue channels. Just imagine the value your ecosystem can co-create with you when you give them the tools to connect anything, and change everything. Watch HSBC’s video to learn more.

#3: Ashley Stewart makes fashion accessible to everyone

Ashley Stewart believes that by skilling up their employees on integration and APIs, they will not only help them thrive in their career but also help their business thrive in the future. “API-led connectivity is the most critical skill and concept to learn to create connected customer experiences and bring new innovations to market. As we broaden the Integration Trailblazers within our team, we will be able to accelerate our digital transformation initiatives, particularly as we expand our SaaS solutions,” said Eileen Rizzo, CIO and SVP of IT at Ashley Stewart. Find out how Ashley Stewart is using APIs to do well by doing good, using the power of APIs. Watch our integration keynote to see Ashley Stewart’s integration story.

#4: Pilot Flying J makes life’s journeys easier for truck drivers

For 60 years, Pilot Flying J has been the largest operator of travel centers in North America, with over 750 locations serving more than 1.5 million professional drivers and traveling motorists daily. The company motto is “fueling life’s journeys,” and at any Pilot Flying J travel center, truck drivers can find overnight parking, showers, a warm meal, and free wifi. But behind the scenes, IT systems were siloed or connected via one-to-one integrations, making critical data inaccessible. To maintain a fully personalized customer experience, Pilot Flying J needed to adopt an omnichannel strategy –– backed by fully integrated systems –– that allowed customers to engage with the brand through multiple channels –– whether it is checking parking availability on the mobile app or reserving showers on the web portal.  

#5: ASICS makes headless commerce a reality

Headless commerce is a vision that enables many retailers to quickly spin up new eCommerce experiences for new digital channels or for a flash sale. But achieving this vision is a challenge, since modern eCommerce experiences require data and context from several different systems. ASICS joined MuleSoft and Salesforce Commerce Cloud to share how they are accelerated and simplified the process to make headless commerce a reality.

#6: Decathalon connects athletes with sports equipment globally

Decathlon is the world leader in sports equipment. Beginning in the U.S. and extending to other locations around the world, the company is leveraging its growing number of reusable APIs to iterate on brand new customer experiences. By integrating various apps, systems, and data using API-led connectivity, Decathlon can now deliver new omnichannel experiences for its customers. Check out this blog to learn more about how Decathlon digitized in-store experience for customers. 

#7: Deluxe

Approximately 4.8 million small businesses and over 4,600 financial institutions use products and services from Deluxe. Through their acquisitions, Deluxe inherited 50+ ERPs, dozens of CRM systems, 30+ order entry systems which all needed to consolidate. “We were getting different descriptions for the same product from different API calls. That shouldn’t happen,” explained one enterprise architect at Deluxe during the Dreamforce session. 

#8: Driscoll’s family-owned business brings farming to the digital age

Driscoll’s is the global market leader for fresh strawberries, blueberries, raspberries and blackberries. With more than 100 years of farming heritage and hundreds of independent growers around the world, Driscoll’s is passionate about growing great tasting berries. They’re on a mission to continually delight their consumers through alignment with growers and customers, retailers and wholesalers. Since berries are perishable, Driscoll’s knew it’d be critical to share real-time data about inventory, shipment dates, and other important logistical data across its supply chain. Driscoll’s underwent a digital transformation and moved from custom code integrations to MuleSoft. The results within the first seven months were creating more than 25 reusable APIs, saving them more than 110 hours of work per integration. Learn more about how companies like Driscoll’s are innovating through integration at NRF in January 2020.  

#9: Genentech

The future of healthcare is personalized patient care. The four P’s for achieving this level of care are prevent, personalize, predict, and participation. Between 30 and 35 systems need to be connected to provide this personalized experience, creating steep integration challenges for the industry. MuleSoft helps Genentech, a biotechnology company, drive customer-centricity and personalized healthcare by freeing data from locked silos with modern APIs.

#10: Solarity Credit Union unifies the banking experience

Solarity Credit Union is a not-for-profit, member-owned financial cooperative. Fifty-one percent of consumers say they would switch banks due to a disconnected experience. Yet for the average bank, over 70% of their systems are disconnected. Solarity Credit Union uses MuleSoft and Financial Services Cloud to unlock core banking systems and provide a unified banking experience for customers. Check out this whitepaper to learn how a top 10 global bank unified data to deliver IT projects 5x faster.

These are ten examples of how Integration Trailblazers are making a difference in the world using APIs. Check out this press release to learn how you can become an expert in APIs today through the Integration Trailblazer course on Trailhead.