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What Enterprise Tech Leaders Need to Know About Digital Innovation in 2020


API Management specialist, Kong, conducted a field survey — which included 200 senior technology decision-makers from the U.S — to reveal how businesses fuel innovation with modern software architecture and emerging technologies.

The survey participants consisted of CIOs, VPs, IT directors and architects, CTOs, and software engineers and developers from varied industries. The audience was evenly divided between public and private companies with 1,000 or more employees. The goal: to empower technology leaders with the information they need to increase their digital innovation speed.

Innovation Velocity

The findings revealed that increasing innovation velocity is a high priority. As customers demand new digital experiences, companies feel pressure to innovate or suffer competitive disruption. Over 70 per cent of technology leaders believe that business failure is inevitable if they do not increase innovation velocity within the next six years. If their digital innovation attempts fall behind their competitors, they will be unable to improve production capacity. Furthermore, 39 per cent of public companies feel they will be out of business or acquired in less than three years. From this, it is evident that increasing innovation velocity is a more significant concern for public companies.

Microservices

Immediate need for innovation velocity has pushed tech leaders to initiate digital transformation journeys in their business, many of which include the integration of API and microservices technologies. Results indicate that 84 per cent of organisations have embraced microservices architectures to accelerate their innovation efforts. Thirty per cent of respondents have already transitioned to microservices architectures. Over a third of respondents — from companies with over 3,000 employees — declared that they run over 100 microservices.

Microservices management is also a key concern; the majority of tech leaders agreed that an inability to support microservices damages their ability to compete in future.

Organisations revealed that their motivations for transitioning to microservices are:

  • Increased deployment speed.
  • Improved security.
  • Faster integration of new tech.
  • Enhanced infrastructure flexibility.

Notably, microservices assist organisations in increasing their innovation speed, while guaranteeing high-performance quality. Eighty-four per cent of technology leaders admit that failure to adopt microservices damages their ability to compete with other companies. If they cannot move at the speed of their given market, their competition will inevitably surpass them.

Respondents disclosed that some of the challenges they faced while leveraging microservices included:

  • Security issues.
  • Difficulties with integrating existing monoliths.
  • Problems with updating API documentation.
  • Complexities with managing services across platforms.

APIs are a crucial component of microservices architectures. However, many tech leaders reported difficulties with developing, managing, securing and scaling APIs. The majority revealed that securing applications and ensuring performance at scale was one of the most significant tech challenges in this century.

Kong’s survey revealed that various businesses are consistently leveraging strategies to assist their innovation efforts. There is a significant business impact when you do not keep up with the pace of digital innovation because competing, even on the edge of the market, becomes challenging. Findings show that 75 per cent of respondents also predict professional ramifications, such as being fired or not receiving bonuses and promotions.

Visit our API and Integration solutions page for more information on how LimePoint, in partnership with Kong, can enhance your innovation velocity.

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