0% found this document useful (0 votes)
51 views14 pages

API-fication: Core Building Block of The Digital Enterprise

Uploaded by

Bhasaar65
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
0% found this document useful (0 votes)
51 views14 pages

API-fication: Core Building Block of The Digital Enterprise

Uploaded by

Bhasaar65
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 14

www.hcltech.

com

API-fication
Core Building Block of the
Digital Enterprise

AUTHORS
Charu Rudrakshi, Principal Architect, DSI
Amit Varshney, Solution Director, DSI
Bharath Yadla, Associate Vice President, DSI
Dr. Rama Kanneganti, Fellow
Kiran Somalwar, VicePresident, MAPI & DSI

API-FICATION AUGUST 2014


API-FICATION | AUGUST 2014

TABLE OF CONTENTS

DIGITAL ENTERPRISES 3
API - A CORE BUILDING BLOCK OF A DIGITAL BUSINESS 4
APIs DEFINED 5
HOW APIs BENEFIT ENTERPRISES 6
WHAT ENTERPRISES ARE DOING WITH APIs 6
API PLATFORMS 7
CONSUMER APPS 8
FLEXIBLE & LIGHTWEIGHT API 9
ENTERPRISE GRADE API 9
LOW COST API 9
CUSTOM-BUILT PLATFORMS AS AN ALTERNATIVE 9
API PLATFORM ENABLEMENT 9
OUR APPROACH 10
API LANDSCAPE AND DISCOVERY 10
API CONCEPTION AND DEFINITION 10
ARCHITECTURE AND IMPLEMENTATION 11
MANAGEMENT, MONITORING AND REPORTING 11
TURBO CHARGING API ADOPTION 11
HCL SERVICE LINES 12
CASE STUDIES 12
MULTI-CHANNEL RETAILER USES AN API PLATFORM TO REDUCE
APP DEVELOPMENT TIME 12
LIFE SCIENCES COMPANY ENABLES APIs FOR INTERNAL AND
EXTERNAL CONSUMERS 13
FINANCIAL SERVICES COMPANY USES APIs TO INTEGRATE
DIGITAL CHANNELS WITH COMPLEX BACK-END SYSTEMS 13
REFERENCES 13
ABOUT HCL 14

© 2014, HCL TECHNOLOGIES. REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED. THIS DOCUMENT IS PROTECTED UNDER COPYRIGHT BY THE AUTHOR, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 2
API-FICATION | AUGUST 2014

DIGITAL ENTERPRISES
The trend of publishing APIs to encourage the development of user applications is not
new. Born digital businesses, such as Yahoo! or Google have back-end platforms and
user-facing applications that provide well-defined APIs to allow access to the business
functionality and data. Online businesses are poised for digital growth by providing
APIs to widen the community of developers. The ubiquity of mobile devices and the
proliferation of social interactions have been an additional stimulus for enterprises to
provide APIs. APIs became the core building blocks of Digital Businesses, which is
clearly seen in their adoption and growth as depicted in the picture below.

Figure 1: Programmable Web API Growth 2005-2013

This paper focuses on what Web APIs (Web Application Programming Interfaces,
called APIs hereafter) are, why they benefit enterprises, and in what situations
enterprises need an API infrastructure. The details about various API platforms, and
their comparison, and implementation methodologies will be covered in the follow-
ups to this paper.

This paper is meant for IT and Product executives who are responsible for:
yy Enabling mobile application development
yy Developing partner eco-systems
yy Evangelizing products and services in developer communities
yy Search of new revenue streams
This paper illustrates ways to leverage existing assets exposed by an enterprise’s internal
systems and make them available to different sets of users — customers, partners,
developers, or internal users, as well as ways to make the enterprise services available
to users on different devices – tablets, handsets and desktops, and through different
channels – in-store, online, call center, or phone.

In this paper, we also discuss a compelling rationale for API offerings, the recent hyper
growth of APIs, the approaches for creating API-based offerings, and the relative merits
of the leading API management platforms. Finally, we present three key business
transformation case studies in Retail, Financial Services, and Pharmaceutical domains.

© 2014, HCL TECHNOLOGIES. REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED. THIS DOCUMENT IS PROTECTED UNDER COPYRIGHT BY THE AUTHOR, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 3
API-FICATION | AUGUST 2014

This paper does not focus on exploring the comparison of various API enablement
platforms and stacks that are currently available in the market; these will be addressed
in subsequent white papers.

API - A CORE BUILDING BLOCK OF A DIGITAL BUSINESS


Historically, business had a product or process centric approach – often customizing
large scale ERPs to achieve automation in quest of efficiency. The recent drive towards
customer and user centricity demands that applications be built rapidly with frequent
iterations. Moreover, to support different segments of users, enterprises need focused
applications that bring the business functionality to the specific customer context.
In this pursuit of user centricity, the key enablers of the “digital shift” are the mobile
shift – for reaching out to the users wherever they are, the cloud shift – to enable rapid
adjustment to fluctuation in demand and a faster, cheaper innovation cycle, and the
multi-channel shift– to allow users to access enterprise assets at their convenience.
Finally, all these changes are supported by improving the user experience through
modern UI techniques and usage patterns such as social elements.

However, the digital shift has inherent complexities


APIs are the defined interfaces
such as the following needs:
through which interactions
yy Need to serve both internal and external needs happen between an enterprise
within an enterprise with conflicting goals of and users of its assets. An API can
governance and security become the primary entry point
yy Need to leverage key assets and services, without for enterprise services, for its
compromising the focus on agility and customer own website and applications, as
centricity well as for partner and customer
integrations.
yy Need for building capabilities that support
new business models without causing business disruption in the existing business
services
yy Need to support agility in development, delivery and operations and support
adjustment to elasticity of demand often through cloud (public or private), and
yet leverage the existing assets in infrastructure, processes, and support, by crafting
suitable business case for selective transformations
These challenges are inherent – that is, they cannot be answered by technology alone.
Any digital shift for an established enterprise must balance with the existing assets,
processes, systems, and operations.
A primary candidate for basing the API systems on is SOA, to support reusability;
however, as SOA itself is actually “built up” from legacy systems of record there are
several problems such as:
yy SOA services are dependable and stable, but slow to change
yy SOA services are inward focused and promote reusability, making them coarse
grained and complex
yy SOA services are standardized in their output, which makes the output slower to
modify, and subject to interpretation
yy SOA services are unable to keep pace with the current speed of innovation and short
iterations in app development because of the nature of “built-up” SOA services and
their relationship with the legacy systems

© 2014, HCL TECHNOLOGIES. REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED. THIS DOCUMENT IS PROTECTED UNDER COPYRIGHT BY THE AUTHOR, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 4
API-FICATION | AUGUST 2014

APIs allow different groups of developers, internal, external and partners to gain
access to enterprise systems in an easily consumable way. Typically, by using an API
platform (that comprises of API layer, API governance, API design time components,
API discovery and documentation, to name a few), these challenges of building and
delivering APIs from SOA and other existing infrastructures are addressed. These
platforms can address the varied demands on security, performance, governance,
stability, flexibility, and agility. In this white paper, we will present a few examples
of API platforms, after we discuss the rationale and the popular applications of APIs.

APIs Defined
APIs are the defined interfaces through which interactions happen between an
enterprise and applications that use its assets. An API can become the primary
entry point for enterprise services, for its own website and applications, as well as
for partner and customer integrations. APIs are defined through a contract so that
any application can use it with relative ease. In contrast to SOA services, APIs are
focused on programmable web, which includes web and native applications. As such,
the technical characteristics of the APIs are different than earlier generation services.

Figure 2: Reusable services serving many yet unknown consumers

An API approach is an architectural approach that revolves around providing


programmable interfaces to a set of services to different applications serving different
types of consumers. It assumes that these different user groups might change or evolve
over time in the way they utilize services. The API approach creates a loosely coupled
architecture that allows a component service to have a wide range of future uses, and
is technology agnostic. Though the API approach is designed to enable app developers
to build apps that rapidly adapt to end user needs, it is built on the same principles as
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), albeit with different focus – namely by focusing
on developers to enable them to program the web.

© 2014, HCL TECHNOLOGIES. REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED. THIS DOCUMENT IS PROTECTED UNDER COPYRIGHT BY THE AUTHOR, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 5
API-FICATION | AUGUST 2014

How APIs Benefit Enterprises


The strategy of providing APIs leads to the following benefits:

1. Reduction of costs: APIs is a cheaper way of building applications by increasing the


reuse of services. Providing a usage or analytics-based evolutionary development
platform decreases cost of development and change to services. As the number of
applications increase, the benefits are more evident.

2. Increasing business agility and foraying into different eco-systems: Since APIs
offer integration with any technology stack, they allow higher productivity for
the developers. Moreover, APIs let the enterprise reach out to a larger pool of
application developers to build apps on a suitable app eco-system (iOS, Android,
Kiosks, desktops) of their choice.

3. Increasing innovation and new business models: By allowing others to build


applications that integrate with their captive data and processes, enterprises see
new applications using their services in new and previously unforeseen contexts.
Developers can incorporate enterprise data and combine it with any third-party
data enabled by APIs such as location or social data.

4. Increasing consumer loyalty: By involving consumers and passionate developers


in a new generation of applications, the enterprise can increase brand awareness
and loyalty in the core groups. These early adopters can drive the market into new
directions that the enterprise is promoting.

While existing digital businesses make the transition easily, we have seen that brick
and mortar businesses can also adopt the same strategy by leveraging APIs to explore
and foray into new business models.

What enterprises are doing with APIs


As discussed earlier, there has been a shift in how enterprises are exposing their services
and data - driven by various elements of consumer centricity. Some of the key areas
that are driving API adoption are:

yy Supporting mobile applications and enterprise


app stores through APIs while hiding the Nissan exposed its APIs to the
complexity of underlying systems charging feature. Now, users can
schedule their cars for charging
yy Extending business functionality and systems during non-peak times, a feature
into the developer eco-system to drive that is made possible by an external
development of apps with cloud and social application built on the APIs
mash-ups, which in turn fosters innovation provided by the company.
yy Embracing APIs as a form of new revenue
streams
A case in point is BMW, which built cars with iDrive, a driver’s-side radio dial for
controlling the display dashboard. By exposing the APIs to iDrive, they enabled a class
of applications that extend the range of in-car services with apps that people already
use, such as web radio, Google Local Search or Facebook, providing a seamless user
experience. Similarly, Nissan exposed its APIs to the charging feature. Now, users can

© 2014, HCL TECHNOLOGIES. REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED. THIS DOCUMENT IS PROTECTED UNDER COPYRIGHT BY THE AUTHOR, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 6
API-FICATION | AUGUST 2014

schedule their cars for charging during non-peak times, a feature that is made possible
by an external application built on the APIs provided by the company.

Figure 3: API Growth in Enterprises

Another example is of a fast food chain that provides APIs to access customer activities,
which can be used by brands to offer special discounts. If a consumer has shown a
preference for a brand of soda, they can be offered a discount coupon to that drink at
a nearby grocery store. In this case, the restaurant chain shares the revenue from the
targeted brand by providing an API to the user transactional data.

A Retail API can give access to the inventory levels and location, which can be used
by mobile applications to guide consumers to stores in the vicinity. The creative use
of such data by a community of application developers creates an additional business
opportunity for retail businesses.

In the financial world, there has been innovation on the payments side from PayPal,
Stripe, Square and many more organizations. In banks, APIs can be used for bank-to-
bank straight through processing. Banks can use data insights to help customers benefit
from their life events such as marriage and their changing economic conditions. This
works better than exploiting the customer situation and cross-selling. To make such
insights available, APIs can ingest inbound events and enable real-time actionable
analytics using “outbound” push events.

API PLATFORMS
As described earlier, APIs are best served through a platform that supports design,
development, deployment, operations, and support. Depending on the context,
these platforms are named Back-end-as-a-Service (BaaS), mBaaS (mobile BaaS), API
gateways, API management platforms etc. They can be based on conventional (hosted,
in-premise, or on cloud) as well as a pay-as-you-go cloud model. In the figure below,
we categorize different providers based on their origin and offerings. Enterprises can
de-risk and accelerate API development and increase adoption by using tried and
tested API Platforms.

An API platform is an API infrastructure that is ready to build and run APIs with
minimum features and common services required of Web APIs, with elements of the
tech stack that digital enterprises need such as caching and security, and preferably
with a built-in support for API development and management. Ideally, it is configured
in the standard way and validated.

© 2014, HCL TECHNOLOGIES. REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED. THIS DOCUMENT IS PROTECTED UNDER COPYRIGHT BY THE AUTHOR, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 7
API-FICATION | AUGUST 2014

API management is the process that provides publishing, promoting, developer self-
help, and governance of APIs in a secure and scalable environment. Optionally, it also
enables creation of end-user support artifacts, forums and collaboration environment.
Following are 10 categories that can determine the relative strengths of API platforms:
1. Ability to support mobile as well as web devices
2. Integration with other APIs
3. Ease of administration
4. Analytics and reporting
5. Rapid development, such as automated conversion to REST (Representational
State Transfer) APIs
6. Scalability and compliance to security requirements
7. Support for cloud and on-site offerings
8. Ability to support any geographic location, user management, and policy/
authentication mechanisms
9. Ability to support digital operations such as push notifications, data-caching,
localization, and geo-targeting
10. Ability to leverage existing services & middleware infrastructure

Enterprise Layer 7
Friendly Segment 2 Segment 3

APIGee
MuleSoft IBM
Mashery Tibco
3Scale

Segment 1 Segment 4
Sencha

Verivo WSO2
Developer
Friendly

Low Leverage Existing Services & Middleware High

Figure 4: API Platform Landscape

Based on the relative strengths in these 10 categories, we can classify the API platforms
as shown in figure 4 into four segments. The image is defined in detail below.

Consumer Apps
The segment 1 is for API management platforms for mobile apps that are mainly
consumer-centric. Such apps are built on technologies such as HTML5 to provide
a dynamic user interface across different channels. The applications are largely
standalone and simple to use. Also, they use limited data, typically related to user
interactions. However, there can be very large number of users for such applications.
Sencha and Verivo have established themselves in this market.

© 2014, HCL TECHNOLOGIES. REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED. THIS DOCUMENT IS PROTECTED UNDER COPYRIGHT BY THE AUTHOR, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 8
API-FICATION | AUGUST 2014

Flexible & Lightweight API


The segment 2 is for newer API management platforms, which make it easy to start
small, possibly with lightweight enablement of API for different eco-systems. Ease of
deployment of the APIs, rapid automated on boarding of application partners and
continual enhancement are the key characteristics of this quadrant. Mashery, which
was acquired by Intel, and 3 Scale have been innovators in this area.

Enterprise Grade API


The segment 3 signifies secure and scalable API management platforms that also support
extensive business intelligence on the API usage. These applications get launched on a
large scale and need to be robust, secure, with high levels of monitoring, and reporting
right from the start. Other key requirements in this space are smooth onboarding of
application partners, and business intelligence at an aggregate level with the ability to
drill down. Computer Associates’ Layer7 and IBM’s Cast Iron have built a significant
customer base because of traditionally robust enterprise level offerings. Because of the
longevity of the API management platform, both companies have a large market base,
with Layer7 being the bigger of the two. Apigee and MuleSoft have an established
customer base due to the ease of use and innovation.

Low Cost API


The Segment 4 is for cheaper and quicker way API management platforms that make
it easy to start small, possibly with mobile first, and then have it grow into large,
scalable offerings. Ease of deployment of the APIs; rapid, automated on-boarding of
application partners; and continual enhancements are the key characteristics of this
quadrant. WSO2 provides an open source-based approach to API management.

Custom-built Platforms as an alternative


Enterprises can build their own API platforms using open
source rapid development platforms like Express over
The integration of core
Node.js, Grails, Spring, and Rails. These frameworks can
be augmented by digital enablement features such as push APIs with common
notifications, data caching, transformation, orchestration services and a robust
and aggregation, device-specific data delivery, localization, framework aids user
validation, error handling, and logging and analytics. This
approach is vendor-agnostic and provides complete control adoption significantly.
over the operations and the cost for high volume or sensitive
systems.

API PLATFORM ENABLEMENT


Most enterprises, moving towards a digital presence, are creating an API infrastructure
to expose services to internal and external developers. The important factors for such
an API platform are clearly identified user groups such as internal teams, partners,
and a community of developers, and the identification of the core value of the services
that expose business functionality and value potential in the captive data. Wherever
feasible, common services such as user authentication, logging, and reporting can

© 2014, HCL TECHNOLOGIES. REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED. THIS DOCUMENT IS PROTECTED UNDER COPYRIGHT BY THE AUTHOR, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 9
API-FICATION | AUGUST 2014

be abstracted out as platform features. The integration of core APIs with common
services and a robust framework aids user adoption significantly.

Another important consideration for an API platform is its customization for target
audiences – internal, partners and external developers.

yy The APIs for internal consumption have a fewer numbers of users. Here API
management is fairly limited, and development as well as the implementation can
proceed in parallel
yy A partner-facing API strategy is dependent on the number of partners and their
relative maturity. In a scenario with a handful of mature partners, APIs can keep
evolving and will only need moderate management, whereas for a large number of
partners, more mature APIs and management platforms are required
yy For a broader developer base - internal as well as external, robust APIs and
management platforms are essential for faster adoption and scalability

Our Approach
API platform enablement includes the definition of business APIs, platform
implementation and deployment including integration with common services APIs,
launch, management, and continued monitoring of the API platform. HCL provides
expertise across all these phases.

Figure 5: HCL API Enablement Framework

API Landscape and Discovery

The discovery phase includes evaluation of the business model, API assessment
for completeness, API strategy, packing and monetization. A strategy workshop is
conducted during this phase to finalize the API roadmap, the high level definitions
and timeline for the implementation of the roadmap, and the monetization options.

API Conception and Definition

API definition should focus on the core business services because common services
such as user management, authentication, metering/billing can be availed from
various platform libraries. For example, a retail business API will include access to
the product inventory, prices, discount coupons, product reviews, and store locations
while services such as payment or billing or shopping cart management can be availed
from existing libraries.

© 2014, HCL TECHNOLOGIES. REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED. THIS DOCUMENT IS PROTECTED UNDER COPYRIGHT BY THE AUTHOR, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 10
API-FICATION | AUGUST 2014

Captive data, which has high potential, needs to be exposed with the right usage
including relevant aggregations. At the same time, a multi-tenant platform needs to
be carefully managed for access rights to the data.

Architecture and Implementation

The API design needs to be architected to service the target audience. Multiple choices
are available for the API management platform and their relative merits are discussed
below. Choosing the right API management tool in the early phase is very important.

yy Architecture and Tradeoffs


RESTful API design is recommended for the future scalability of the platform and
for integration with tools and services from other vendors. Existing APIs need to be
evaluated and modified, where necessary, for compliance with RESTful API guidelines.

APIs must have hooks into the logging, metering, billing and reporting infrastructure.
Granularity and breadth of interfaces are determined by the audience requirements
and goals.

yy Seamless Integration
Core APIs need to be presented in a seamlessly integrated offering to create a unified
experience for t users. Any repetitive operation between APIs, such as multiple requests
for user credentials creates barriers to a wider adoption of the APIs. Integration with
common services such as authentication, logging, and metadata management will
facilitate the creation of a complete package for application developers.

yy Certification and Launch


An API is expected to be a multichannel offering that enables operation across multiple
browsers of devices. Good design and a strong testing framework are necessary to
validate the functions across multiple channels. Such API launches also include
examples of applications or use cases of APIs.

Management, Monitoring and Reporting

Continuous support and improvement of the platform or the API requires detailed
data on API use, data traffic, and exceptions. A management dashboard to display
aggregate data is an essential part of IT operations.

Frequent reports and online monitoring of the APIs will help provision for fluctuation
in API usage needs, identify bottlenecks that inhibit scalability as well as suggest
operational improvements. Visualization tools are available for a wide-ranging
audience such as the API support staff, and for the operations management team.

Turbo charging API Adoption

Post-development, there may be initial challenges in API adoption. This is a very


critical phase in API enablement. During this time, use of analytics helps optimize
the API offerings for users and in turn increases adoption. Usage analytics can include
data flow, peak demands, most widely used APIs, and least likely to be used APIs.

© 2014, HCL TECHNOLOGIES. REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED. THIS DOCUMENT IS PROTECTED UNDER COPYRIGHT BY THE AUTHOR, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 11
API-FICATION | AUGUST 2014

Developing use cases for API usage, new apps, and setting up an innovation center are
other steps that can be taken to turbo-charge the adoption of APIs.

HCL SERVICE LINES


The goal of every API strategy is to increase business by catapulting innovation through
a community of developers. The success of such initiatives hinges on continuous API
adoption. The right approach starts with a careful design of the initial offering and
continuous improvements based on target audience understanding. It is an iterative
process where time-to-market is a critical factor. HCL’s expertise can help optimize
effort and reduce misplaced iterations in the following critical areas of API strategy:

yy Intelligent choice of APIs: It is critical to design APIs that expose the core value
proposition and data from the business, and minimize any effort on a utility API
that can be available from other sources. With our knowledge and expertise in
wide-ranging utility APIs, we can reduce the cycle time for this critical activity. We
also aggressively promote the design of RESTful APIs
yy API lifecycle management: After the first version of the API, continual monitoring
of its use, both from a feature and volume and frequency perspective, is critical for
its continual adoption by customers. HCL can put into place the right monitoring
and improvement processes that will ensure that the adoption grows continually
yy API management platform and reporting: Choosing an API management
platform that fits the business strategy is critical to success across the API lifecycle.
HCL can help choose and implement the right API platform from the vast array
of traditional ESB platforms, as well as new solutions that started with API
management as their core focus
There are 3 service lines that HCL offers as a part of API enablement:
1. API Landscape & Discovery: Enabling customers with an API strategy and a
discovery phase.
2. API Development & Life Cycle Management: Designing and developing APIs
based on an API platform, monitoring, support, and management.
3. API Adoption & Turbo Charging: Setting up an innovation center, app
development, and use case development for faster and sustained adoption of APIs.

CASE STUDIES
Three case studies have been selected from HCL’s many API-related engagements and
are discussed below. They are from multi-channel retail, life sciences, and financial
services domains.

Multi-Channel Retailer Uses an API Platform to Reduce


App Development Time
A multi-channel retailer had a requirement to create a modern web platform that
could be accessed through multiple customer channels — in-store, call center, online
and through multiple devices — tablets, laptops, desktops. The platform had to be

© 2014, HCL TECHNOLOGIES. REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED. THIS DOCUMENT IS PROTECTED UNDER COPYRIGHT BY THE AUTHOR, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 12
API-FICATION | AUGUST 2014

available to partner channels with adequate controls and security. The retailer was also
looking to accelerate the time-to-market for apps, and drive marketplace innovation
to gain a competitive edge.

HCL helped create an API services platform that had common services and
frameworks for authorization, security, I18N, validation, error handling, logging
and regression testing available to developers of different business modules. The
effort spanned fifty people months. The platform was built in a DIY mode using
Grails as MVC framework. The API platform was consumed by an HTML5-based
App platform using Bootstrap.js. The common UI components and templates were
prebuilt as per UX guidelines, reducing iterations between business, user experience,
and development teams. The use of iterative development and loose coupling between
the Apps and Backend APIs resulted in fast mockups and parallel development on
APIs. This reduced the development time for apps built using the platform by 50%,
and provided consistency in the App portfolio built by geographically-spread teams.

Life Sciences Company Enables APIs for Internal and External


Consumers
HCL is currently working with a pharmaceutical organization to integrate multiple
in-house applications and provide a unified API platform to a diverse audience of
developers, partners, employees, and to multiple devices including mobile phones. The
cloud-based platform includes the separation of enterprise data, API development, API
management, and client application development. Currently, the API management
platform evaluation is underway.

HCL will implement fifty APIs. The project goal is an 80% reduction in the store
activation time, and a 75% reduction in the channel partner on-boarding time.

Financial Services Company Uses APIs to Integrate Digital Channels


with Complex Back-end Systems
For UK’s leading Foreign Exchange supplier offering a range of services including
management of prepaid Travel Money Cards, HCL developed an API layer to be
consumed by digital channels such as mobile and tablet apps, internet browsers, and
other external and internal consumers. The APIs exposed workflows for Top-up,
Account Unlocking, and account management from any device.

REFERENCES
(n.d.). Forrester Report.

(n.d.). Programmable Web White Papers and Presentation.

© 2014, HCL TECHNOLOGIES. REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED. THIS DOCUMENT IS PROTECTED UNDER COPYRIGHT BY THE AUTHOR, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 13
ABOUT HCL

About HCL Technologies


HCL Technologies is a leading global IT services company working with clients in the
areas that impact and redefine the core of their businesses. Since its emergence on the
global landscape, and after its IPO in 1999, HCL has focused on ‘transformational
outsourcing’, underlined by innovation and value creation, offering an integrated
portfolio of services including software-led IT solutions, remote infrastructure
management, engineering and R&D services and business services. HCL leverages
its extensive global offshore infrastructure and network of offices in 31 countries to
provide holistic, multi-service delivery in key industry verticals including Financial
Services, Manufacturing, Consumer Services, Public Services and Healthcare &
Life Sciences. HCL takes pride in its philosophy of ‘Employees First, Customers
Second’ which empowers its 91,691 transformers to create real value for customers.
HCL Technologies, along with its subsidiaries, had consolidated revenues of
US$ 5.4 billion, for the Financial Year ended as on 30th June 2014. For more information,
please visit www.hcltech.com

About HCL Enterprise


HCL is a $6.5 billion leading global technology and IT enterprise comprising
two companies listed in India – HCL Technologies and HCL Infosystems.
Founded in 1976, HCL is one of India’s original IT garage start-ups. A pioneer
of modern computing, HCL is a global transformational enterprise today. Its
range of offerings includes product engineering, custom & package applications,
BPO, IT infrastructure services, IT hardware, systems integration, and
distribution of information and communications technology (ICT) products
across a wide range of focused industry verticals. The HCL team consists of over
95,000 professionals of diverse nationalities, who operate from 31 countries
including over 505 points of presence in India. HCL has partnerships with
several leading global 1000 firms, including leading IT and technology firms.
For more information, please visit www.hcl.com

Hello there! I am an Ideapreneur. I believe that sustainable business outcomes are driven by relationships nurtured through
values like trust, transparency and flexibility. I respect the contract, but believe in going beyond through collaboration,
applied innovation and new generation partnership models that put your interest above everything else. Right now 95,000
Ideapreneurs are in a Relationship Beyond the Contract™ with 500 customers in 31 countries. How can I help you?

You might also like