Globally, there are countless IT leaders, developers, architects, and business users who are constantly reimagining ways of working. They’re taking their first-hand experience of the inner workings of their organizations, and dreaming up innovative ways to make things better for themselves, their colleagues, and customers.
However, integration is critical to turning all that imagination into real, tangible innovation. The challenge is that many approaches to integration are too rigid, and place too much pressure on IT to deliver everything the business needs. That’s why a new approach to integration, data, security, and full lifecycle API management is becoming even more essential.
Composability drives transformation
Let’s look at the composition of the global workforce for a moment. There are around 22 million developers worldwide, but well over 1 billion knowledge workers within business teams outside of IT.
These business teams are driving transformation every day and are intimately familiar with business needs, yet they’re unable to act on their innovative ideas by writing code. As such, they rely on IT and this inevitably slows both sides down, hampering business-wide innovation.
So, the million-dollar question is: How do we make knowledge workers active participants in business transformation? And how can IT help them succeed in a way that creates less work for IT, while being secure and governed?
The answer lies in composability, which involves using standardized, reusable APIs as building blocks to create new experiences, products, and services. These building blocks can be composed, decomposed, and recomposed with greater speed and efficiency. All without having to write custom code every time — empowering knowledge workers to build for themselves.
With composability, organizations can solve immediate challenges whilst building a foundation of reuse for the future, where each project can be built faster than the last. IT can achieve all this whilst maintaining security and governance, and reducing technical debt.
This is what MuleSoft Composer for Salesforce seeks to achieve. By providing a fast, easy way for business teams to connect apps and data without writing code, Composer empowers knowledge workers to innovate and solve problems without relying on IT. This all serves to help organizations turn ideas into innovation, and transform faster.
For instance, with Composer’s library of pre-built connectors, Salesforce admins can build automation workflows between NetSuite and Salesforce to streamline order-to-cash activities and boost efficiency across sales operations. Teams can also easily visualize sales data using the Tableau connector.
Turbocharging innovation
The launch of Composer came following a year of unprecedented demand for digital services and, by extension, the APIs that keep them running.
Naturally, a major prerequisite to how well an organization can scale and provide these digital services is how effectively it can use its existing capabilities and data that are exposed with APIs. As customer needs grow, organizations need more data — which must be requested, extracted, and joined from many different APIs.
However, this can often lead to a net-new API just to join data together, with the time and effort this takes slowing innovation down. Instead, it makes sense for organizations to pull and query data from multiple APIs at once, without having to build an additional API to enable that.
This is the challenge that MuleSoft’s newly launched DataGraph works to meet, by enabling developers to dynamically query data across even hundreds of APIs, without building an additional integration.
The result is that, despite the constantly growing demand for integration, connecting more systems does not require more effort. This makes it faster and easier for IT teams to scale out their digital capabilities and data to deliver the competitive advantage they’re seeking.
A roadmap to the future
At MuleSoft, we see future businesses running on a vast universe of APIs with many transports, architectural patterns, and deployment environments.
Over the coming year, we’ll make it possible to tame the complexities of that future, by allowing all APIs to be discovered, managed, governed, and leveraged through reuse. In this way, we will continue to support organizations along their transformation journeys, empowering IT leaders, developers, architects, and business teams to turn their imagination into innovation.
Want to hear more from our CEO Brent Hayward about the future of integration and innovation? Watch our MuleSoft CONNECT keynote on-demand:
