We invited Savannah Cole, Head of Marketing and Paul Kersey, Head of Service Delivery at Apisero — a Premier MuleSoft partner and the Americas Growth and Emerging Partner of the Year — to share five ways to achieve ROI, fast. Previously, Apisero has partnered with industry-leading organizations such as Isagenix, Blue Yonder, Wheelpros, and Chargepoint to build personalized, connected customer experiences using Anypoint Platform.
Recently purchased or in the early stages of adoption, no matter where you are in your integration journey with MuleSoft, at some point, you’ll need to show a return on investment to key stakeholders. In reality, knowing when, where, and how your business can expedite time to value is not always as well-defined.
Below, we’ve outlined five strategies you should start implementing to fast-track your ROI and create long-term success with MuleSoft.
#1 Identify transformational use cases
Now that you’ve invested in Anypoint Platform, how do you unlock the true potential of API-led connectivity to achieve your business outcomes? While many executives and project stakeholders are great at defining current requirements, their teams are often tasked with navigating the unclear pathway to digital success.
Luckily, MuleSoft allows your organization to work from the top-down, identifying key pain points within your business processes that you can use to build transformational use cases. This is where the importance of understanding your current landscape comes into play.
By identifying and targeting opportunities to replace tedious, manual processes with integrated, connected experiences — you free up bandwidth to focus on other business-critical initiatives while capitalizing on readily available assets and reducing your process and operational spend.
#2 Reduce time-to-market with focused use cases
We get it. There’s a backlog of requirements your IT team needs to tackle, and new requests are coming in daily. Deciding which use cases to develop first can often seem like a daunting task. However, it’s essential to focus your efforts on use cases that build a stable foundation for your future deployments.
Specifically, you want to make sure that anything you build can be reused repeatedly without going back to the drawing board. After all, isn’t that the beauty behind MuleSoft? As you develop and incorporate more reusable assets into your architecture, you simultaneously minimize future project expenses and optimize time-to-market.
For your first project, we always suggest selecting a few key strategic use cases — keeping in mind the opportunities for potential reuse — that will pave the way for future deliverables. Reuse the APIs you built with your initial use case(s) to reduce developer hours and avoid unnecessary project costs in the following sprints. Continue to encourage this model within your business divisions, and over time, your team’s mindset will shift to focus on areas where one API can be reused across multiple applications.
Fortunately, with the right architecture and design, you’ll soon be on your way to unlocking key benefits and realizing substantial cost savings.
#3 Build experiences with application reuse
One of the best aspects behind building reusable APIs is that they allow you to close the IT delivery gap. As a result, your business can innovate faster, with less overhead and development time.
To get the most out of your investment, leverage your new infrastructure, and reusable components to optimize your consumers’ digital experience, and create new channels of engagement.
With decreased development costs and a foundation built for reusability, your business can push new products and services to market in channels that might otherwise be inconceivable. To capitalize on new revenue streams, begin re-evaluating your business avenues for areas where automation or integration could deliver, and start building out a holistic view of your digital experience.
#4 Drive early enablement
It’s no surprise that an enabled team is a successful team. Nevertheless, one of the issues we see businesses face most often is that although their architecture is well-defined, their teams are still unable to drive the productivity needed to keep up with market consumers’ inbounding demands.
How would this happen? We like to refer to it as a “lapse in enablement,” and typically, it occurs whenever there is an ineffective or undervalued enablement strategy. As an example, think back to your most recent employee onboarding experience. Was the onboarding process smooth, or were there gaps in delivery that left you feeling a bit overwhelmed and out-of-touch with your new environment? If you’re part of the latter, chances are you simply were not enabled with the resources or support needed to recreate success. On the other hand, someone who participates in streamlined onboarding has the information and tools needed to produce targeted results at speed.
The same concept applies to your business.
Now that you’ve invested in a platform that can drive the speed, agility, and scalability that match your business objectives, you’ll need to enable your team — inclusively but not exclusively IT — to deliver on these requirements. Developing a Center for Enablement (C4E) to help drive the consumption of reusable assets and taking advantage of a comprehensive MuleSoft training program is a great way to enable your team early on.
With the right enablement strategy and support from project stakeholders, your team can deliver faster and more efficient business solutions that address your specific needs and reduce overall production costs.
#5 Leverage CloudHub for quick and easy deployment
By now, you’ve probably heard about MuleSoft’s iPaaS solution — CloudHub. But did you know that by leveraging CloudHub to build your MuleSoft environment, you can accelerate time to value while minimizing business’ capital expenses?
Eliminating the need for servers, additional hardware, and provisioning requirements, CloudHub is designed to be a fully-managed, cloud-based integration solution that you can use to optimize infrastructure and quickly deploy applications with ease.
Take advantage of your MuleSoft subscription by positioning CloudHub as your go-to cloud platform to achieve high availability, eliminate downtime, and swiftly deploy applications that save big on capital spending and deliver value on day one.
Conclusion
From identifying transformational use cases to driving early enablement, building for reuse, and quickly deploying assets to the cloud, there are several ways to future-proof your infrastructure and gain fast ROI with MuleSoft. In addition, encouraging business and technology teams to work together to establish proper KPIs that demonstrate ROI and speed to market can help key stakeholders realize immediate value.
So, now that you have the knowledge you need to create lasting impact, how will you get there? That’s where Apisero can help.
Apisero’s revolutionary Application Development and Support Program — MuleThrive™ — was developed to empower your organization to deliver innovation, increase development velocity, and support existing integrations on time and within budget.
To get started with MuleThrive, reach out to Apisero to learn more.
