Application Program Interfaces, more commonly referenced as APIs, are playing an increasingly important role in today’s ever-competitive, tech-savvy businesses. APIs enable controlled interaction and data sharing between different tools and system programs that a company is using. Think of them as the bridge between databases and solutions. With the help of APIs, developers and businesses can now build services that combine different functions with minimal effort. This gives businesses greater efficiency and allows for faster innovation as a whole. It’s for this reason that organizations across various industries are looking to learn more about APIs and harness its potential business benefits.
Jitterbit, a leading integration solutions provider, is on a mission to help enterprises harness the power of APIs. Through the Jitterbit API integration platform, companies can take the leap to API-first connectivity, enabling them to rapidly create, run, secure, manage, and analyze internal and external APIs for any cloud, on-premise, or mobile app in a cloud-native platform.
SourceForge recently caught up with Simon Peel, the Chief Strategy Officer and Chief Marketing Officer at Jitterbit, and asked him to shed some light on APIs as well as the importance of a robust API integration strategy for enterprises. Peel also discussed the Jitterbit API integration platform and how it gives today’s businesses the power to innovate and to make smarter decisions.
Q: Please tell us a bit more about Jitterbit as a company. And what’s the story behind the company’s name?
Simon Peel, the Chief Strategy Officer and Chief Marketing Officer at Jitterbit
A: Jitterbit was founded in December 2005 and currently serves a broad range of industries from healthcare and education to manufacturing and technology companies who are looking to achieve digital transformation through connected processes and data.
The name Jitterbit is based on a musical theme and came from a combination of “Jitterbug” and “bits”. The idea was that we orchestrate the dance of bits from Application to Application, using our product which was christened “Harmony”.
Jitterbit has more than 240 employees.
Q: 2017 was dubbed by a number of news outlets as the ‘Year of the API Economy’. To break it down to the necessities, how can you explain t the concept of APIs in the simplest of terms? What roles do APIs play in digital transformation?
A: An API is simply a way to ask an application or data source for information or the answer to a question: “who are our top 10 customers?”, “did the Johnson deal close?”, “notify me when we ship any engines that cost more than $10M”, “here’s a customer number, give me a list of everything they’ve purchased” and so on. With the premise that existing systems hold the answers to most questions already, you can string together API calls from different systems into complete applications ie. APIs become a way to avoid recreating the wheel when building something new.
Many companies that took off and disrupted whole industries faster than anyone expected used APIs to assemble a combination of good ideas and technologies that already existed, to create something new. Take a look at something like ride sharing. Lyft and Uber didn’t have to invent a map or location service or messaging platform or billing system. Those things existed, and they were able to combine these various elements using APIs, into something revolutionary that made people’s lives easier.
Q: When companies speak about API integration, what are they referencing? What factors and trends can underscore the importance of a robust API integration strategy?
A: API integration is the coming together of APIs and integration. APIs are the front door — the way someone asks for information or the answer to a question. The integration part is how the API turns around and connects/integrates into the applications and databases that it needs to get the answers to those questions, before serving up the responses to the requester via the API.
Our cloud-based API integration platform enables companies to create these APIs and connect the API into those backend systems, 75% faster than doing this by hand.
There are many trends that underscore the importance of a robust API integration strategy, here are two of the biggest:
(1) Mobile first. Customers go to their mobile devices first, for everything. Companies have created on-premise systems over many years. None of them mobile. All locked away behind the firewall. APIs open up any system safely and securely. These APIs can then be accessed immediately by Mobile applications both internally or externally.
(2) The explosion of best of breed applications. Companies are switching on Cloud applications and Cloud Services at an alarmingly rapid rate. Mostly Cloud or mobile applications and services. Mostly starting with the Line Of Business outside of IT’s control. According to a recent Netskope Cloud Report, the average enterprise uses 98 Cloud services in HR, 87 services in Marketing, 63 in Finance and so on. But how do these applications talk to each other? The answer is API integration.
Q: In your opinion, how can businesses go about choosing the right API integration platform?
A: First and foremost, establish goals and benchmarks. Too often, APIs are seen as an enabler of technology as opposed to a core business strategy, and this first step can be rushed. Once you have a clear agreement on what you want to accomplish through an API integration strategy you’ll be able to determine what types features and functionality will best suit your needs. Also look for a low-code platform that enables the full API lifecycle through an easy to use graphical interface. Requiring developers to write code to stand up and manage new APIs using a platform undermines its value proposition.
Q: Tell us a bit more about Jitterbit’s API integration platform. How does it help organizations unleash the ‘transformative power of APIs and integration?’
A: Using the Jitterbit API integration platform, companies can rapidly connect SaaS, on-premise and cloud applications and instantly infuse artificial intelligence into any business process. Our intuitive API creation technology enables companies to tap into business-critical applications and data to bring new offerings to market in days, not weeks or months.
APIs have the power to expose information that was previously trapped in legacy systems. Until recently, exposing that information through APIs required a team of developers to code different APIs and microservices for each of the enterprise applications that companies relied on to run their business. But that task required a prohibitive amount of time and resources. Manual API development is untenable: it’s too slow and costly to keep up with the demands of the real-time economy. Fortunately, much of the foundation for building these APIs have already been completed by Jitterbit through our years of work integrating to a wide range of systems. Because we’ve already done the heavy lifting of collecting and transforming data from thousands of enterprise systems to feed into other applications, it’s a straightforward task to expose these integrations as microservices that can be accessed by internal and external users. We have combined the power of an integration platform with the ability to create, access, securely manage and govern APIs, so business leaders can innovate quickly, deliver rich customer experiences and take immediate advantage of new business opportunities.
Q: In what ways does the Jitterbit platform enable businesses to explore Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the enterprise?
CRM: Nearly every business relies on Salesforce or other CRM platforms to power their sales and to manage customer relationships. CRM technologies are already innovative, and are enormously valuable pillars for running companies, but even the most advanced systems can become more valuable with the addition of AI. For instance, AI can help organizations predict with pinpoint accuracy how likely a current prospect is to become a paying customer or predict early warning signs of customer attrition.
Customer Service: AI has made it possible for chatbots to automatically answer just about any query thrown their way. That technology can also be used to enable contact centers to quickly translate incoming and outgoing queries from around the world. For instance, by using APIs to access Google’s Translate AI, Salesforce reps are able to more seamlessly reply to queries in dozens of languages. AI infused into customer service processes can help companies cut costs, close support tickets faster and increase customer satisfaction.
Q: In July, Jitterbit launched the Jitterbit Community. What has been the response of your user and customer base thus far?
A: 436 users have registered thus far with Jitterbit Community. While the initial posts were contributed by Jitterbit, 72.6% of the total posts have been contributed by customers. We pride ourselves on allowing for the community members to engage with each other before stepping in. We are seeing an increasing trend of active customer participation in providing answers to each other, which has decreased the interaction needed from our moderators. Less than 97% of the posts are answered within 24 hours and our moderators & support team ensure that all questions are answered.
Q: Jitterbit recently raised $25 million in a Series C funding round. So what can customers expect from the company in the coming year? Are there any new features or upgrades that you’re working on and would like to give us a sneak peek at?
A: We took additional funding to continue to fuel the tremendous growth we have been seeing. The iPaaS market grew 65% last year for the third year, and Jitterbit grew significantly more than that. We will use the funding to fuel our Sales, Marketing, Product and geographic expansion. Not surprisingly, we are hiring aggressively across the company. From a product expansion perspective, you can look forward to an increased emphasis on AI and Machine Learning, hundreds of new ready-made integration templates which we call recipes, an expansion of our ground-breaking Citizen Integrator product which empowers regular application users to solve integration problems without burdening IT and much more.
Q: What enterprise integration trends are you seeing on the horizon? And how is Jitterbit addressing these head-on?
A: By far the biggest trend we have seen over the past 24 months is the move from on-premise integration to cloud integration. According to Gartner, over 80% of all new integrations will be done using a Cloud Integration solution. What we are just starting to see is Cloud to Cloud integration.
Over the last several years, we have seen the enterprise Platform as a Service vendors (Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM etc) try to lock enterprises into their platform by building or acquiring differentiating capabilities that Enterprises will hopefully come to rely on. However, in 2018 I think businesses will actually push back on this by continuing to work with multiple cloud providers, with the goal of getting the best of breed and hedging their bets. I think this will have two side effects: firstly, the ability to share data between clouds will be key buying criteria and enterprises will increasingly look for systems that seamlessly connect data from different clouds and with on-premises applications. Jitterbit acts as a broker between the public clouds so that enterprises can leverage whichever cloud best suits their needs on a day-to-day basis.
What’s next? The rise of increasingly automated integration. As we templatize more integrations into repeatable patterns and apply Machine Learning to these, we will be able to automatically integrate systems and data. If a user asks an application for data that’s stored elsewhere, it will be able to consult the AI engine and be told where and how to get that information and will retrieve it automatically. Exciting times!
About Jitterbit
Jitterbit, the API transformation company, delivers powerful and easy-to-use integration solutions that allow today’s modern enterprises to solve application, data, and business process integration problems. Based in California, Jitterbit offers the Jitterbit API integration platform that lets companies connect SaaS, on-premise and cloud applications while adding artificial intelligence into any business process. Jitterbit is named as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration Platform-as-a-Service, and also ranked #1 in Customer Satisfaction for Cloud Data Integration on G2Crowd.