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Apigee: a resource for efficient, secure and strategic APIs

Apigee: a resource for efficient, secure and strategic APIs

by Nuno Santos
2024-07-18
4 min
5 SECONDS-SUMMARY:
  • Google developed Apigee, an API management platform that manages and protects the entire lifecycle of APIs through Google Cloud.
  • This solution offers numerous benefits for businesses and teams.
  • In this article, you will find out how Apigee can help your company achieve better results.

In today’s innovative digital world, APIs (Application Programming Interface) are considered the backbone of innovation as they drive business growth.

Nowadays, the connection between systems and data sharing is crucial for all organisations. However, managing APIs efficiently and securely can become a challenge due to the complexity of developing processes, security and various integrations.

With this in mind, Google developed Apigee – an API Management platform that manages and protects the entire life cycle of APIs through Google Cloud. The platform is not just for publishing APIs; its purpose goes far beyond that. With this platform, it is possible to create, publish, control traffic, ensure greater security, gain insights through analytics and maintain API compliance and governance.

Imagem 1: Mapa visual de um processo (fonte: Microsoft)

Apigee business benefits

The research and choice of an API management solution implicitly demonstrates a need to understand its benefits for the business. Over the years, APIs have become strategic assets. As such, they are now a central element of companies’ digital strategies and enable your firm to:

  • Accelerate innovation: reducing time-to-market for APIs, allowing a more agile development of solutions that drive your company’s growth;
  • Increase revenue: creating new revenue streams by monetising your APIs, expanding your portfolio to attract new markets and customers;
  • Improve customer satisfaction: developing reliable and easy-to-use APIs, providing experiences that foster customer loyalty;
  • Reduce costs: optimising your IT resources by automating repetitive tasks, and minimising security risks and operational cost;
  • Ensure compliance: meeting compliance requirements, protecting your company’s data and reputation.

Benefits of Apigee for teams

Apigee simplifies the API management process, allowing teams to focus on building digital solutions that enhance companies’ market positions. With Apigee, teams can:

  • Create and publish APIs quickly: use an intuitive visual editor and automation features to create and publish RESTful and SOAP APIs quickly and easily, without complex coding;
  • Gain actionable insights: analyse usage data, such as user behaviours and performance metrics, ensuring strategic decisions based on viable data;
  • Ensure compliance and security: meet compliance requirements, protecting your company’s data and reputation against sophisticated cyber threats.

How Apigee supports robust, scalable APIs

Building robust and scalable APIs geared toward business growth can be a complex challenge, especially when dealing with a large volume of information. Apigee offers effective resources for building robust and scalable APIs capable of supporting business growth. With Apigee, your company can:

  • Manage traffic intelligently: applying policies for routing, authentication, authorisation and throttling to control access to APIs, ensuring reliability and security even under high workloads;
  • Monitor performance in real time: gaining actionable insights into API performance, identifying possible bottlenecks and problems that can be quickly resolved, ensuring your APIs are not strained;
  • Implement high availability solutions: using load management and automatic failover features, ensuring your APIs are always available, even in case of failures or traffic spikes;
  • Automate repetitive tasks: automating API management tasks, configuring them to ensure performance monitoring policies, and giving your team more time for strategic tasks;
  • Message routing: routing messages to different queues or endpoints based on specific criteria, ensuring messages are processed by the correct systems;
  • Integrate with message queue providers: integrating with various providers, like Google Cloud Pub/Sub, Amazon SQS and Apache Kafka.

As companies include Apigee in their strategic vision, they can support a large number of requests per second, even with unexpected traffic spikes. This way, they can scale their APIs to meet growing business demands.

Therefore, it is necessary to guarantee the availability and optimal performance of APIs, 24/7, so as not to compromise the efficient and scalable processing of large volumes of communication.

API economy: how to transform APIs into products and services

When we talk about the API economy, we mean a business model where APIs can be transformed into products and services that generate value, which can then be commercialised internally or externally.

Based on the evolution of platforms like Apigee, we understand the impact of developing a sustainable API economy. Companies create APIs to expose their data, functionalities and services, allowing partners, developers and customers to consume and integrate the APIs into their own applications and digital solutions.

This way, we can multiply the creation of value that business ecosystems develop, both inside and outside companies, resulting in increased value perceived by the user in relation to your business.

Security and compliance are important factors of the API economy, given that a large volume of confidential data must be stored securely. Consequently, organisations must ensure the use of best practices, guaranteeing mechanisms to detect any data breaches.
Apigee can help companies achieve better results, reinforcing the idea that it is a strategic partner and not just an API management platform. According to data released by Google, Apigee can:

  • Reduce time to market for a product or service by up to 50%;
  • Increase revenue by up to 20%;
  • Improve customer satisfaction by up to 15%;
  • Decrease security costs by up to 30%.

Xpand IT believes that Apigee is more than an API management platform. It has become a strategic partner that helps different companies achieve their business goals, driving innovation, security and success. Contact us to learn how we can enhance your APIs, ensuring a greater revenue flow in your company.

Nuno SantosApigee: a resource for efficient, secure and strategic APIs
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Multicloud: how to empower innovation in organisations

Multicloud: how to empower innovation in organisations

by Nuno Santos
2024-06-20
3 min
5 SECONDS-SUMMARY:
  • Multicloud concept allows organisations to use and manage more than one cloud platform simultaneously.
  • Adopting these infrastructures has several benefits, such as Flexibility and scalability, Resource optimisation, Cost reduction, Risk exposure reduction, and Compliance and security.
  • But there are also challenges. Discover everything in this article.

In a technologically volatile and rapidly evolving era, adaptation and resilience have become essential elements for any organisation.
This is where the multicloud concept comes in, an infrastructure approach that allows organisations to use and manage more than one cloud platform simultaneously.

This model not only provides flexibility and reduces dependence on a single provider, but also aligns perfectly with the need for companies to become increasingly agile, given the enormous volatility of the markets.

Main drivers for adopting a multicloud strategy

Organisations are increasingly inclined to adopt multicloud infrastructures for different reasons, whether to facilitate independence, optimise costs or take advantage of the ability to choose specific services, depending on the cloud provider. This approach has numerous benefits, such as:

  • Flexibility and scalability: being able to choose different cloud providers facilitates independence and makes it possible to optimise certain tasks based on factors such as speed, performance, geographical location and compliance.
  • Resource optimisation: the ability to distribute different data across different clouds ensures the continuity and resilience of operations.
  • Cost reduction: adopting different clouds can potentially reduce operational costs, as organisations can choose services from different providers depending on their needs.
  • Risk exposure reduction: not relying exclusively on a single cloud provider allows organisations to mitigate the impact of global infrastructure failures supporting their services.
  • Compliance and security: multiple clouds help organisations meet regulatory compliance requirements and increase security by distributing data and applications across different systems.

The multicloud approach not only answers the need for flexibility and efficiency but serves as catalyst for innovation, and can even bring a competitive advantage over the competition. With the possibility of leveraging the best that each platform has to offer, organisations gain the ability to develop and launch new applications faster, adapting quickly to market changes.

An example of this is how opting for a multicloud strategy allows organisations to implement and scale applications in different cloud environments, reducing the time to market of these solutions and facilitating a “fail fast” mindset.

Challenges in adopting a multicloud strategy

While the multicloud strategy presents numerous benefits, organisations must also consider the adoption challenges. The complexity of managing multicloud environments is one of the main obstacles, as managing different platforms and services from different providers requires a diverse set of skills and appropriate management tools. As such, organisations will need to consider challenges such as:

  • The complexity of managing services and data;
  • Ensuring consistent maintenance and security;
  • Consistent and reliable performance across clouds; and
  • Integration and interoperability between platforms.

Therefore, it is essential to ensure that organisations adopt effective strategies and tools to enable smooth, efficient communication between different cloud services.

Artificial intelligence: an ally in the multicloud strategy

Artificial intelligence (AI) plays a key role as an ally of a multicloud strategy, because it offers advanced features that help organisations optimise the management of different platforms. AI can automate resource allocation, optimising the use of different cloud systems based on cost, performance or other needs, delivering more efficient, economical resource management.

Furthermore, AI contributes significantly to the security of multicloud environments, with algorithms capable of detecting anomalous patterns and responding to threats in real time.

In the integration context, AI technology can also facilitate the analysis and correlation of data between different platforms, allowing organisations to obtain comprehensive insights, facilitating more informed, confident decision-making.

By capitalising on AI capabilities, companies will be able to simplify the inherent complexity of multicloud management, boosting innovation and operational efficiency, and strategically positioning themselves in a place of digital transformation.

In summary, multicloud infrastructure emerges as a strategic response for organisations seeking to innovate while remaining competitive in a world that demands rapid and constant adaptation.

Contact us and learn more about how you can implement a multicloud strategy to ensure a resilient business model.

Nuno SantosMulticloud: how to empower innovation in organisations
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Middleware: Multicloud integration

Middleware: Multicloud integration

by Nuno Santos
2024-04-17
3 min
5 SECONDS-SUMMARY:
  • Middleware plays a fundamental role in companies by creating cohesive and easily manageable digital ecosystems.
  • In this article, we will explore the multicloud strategy, its benefits, and how we can assist in transforming companies’ digital strategies.

We live in an era where digital transformation transcends borders. Technology connects processes, people and strategies, encouraging organisations to redefine not only their business model but also their innovation methods and how they deliver solutions to their customers.

In this dynamic and disruptive scenario, topics like middleware and integration in multicloud environments are essential components whose understanding is not just technical but rather strategic necessities that can define an organisation’s success in the digital age. Given the current ease and ability to integrate and utilise multiple cloud platforms, the need to discuss topics such as communication and data management in applications becomes critical.

The importance of Middleware in business contexts

Integration and interoperability among various platforms have introduced a new business paradigm. In an organisational reality, middleware transcends its technical function, assuming a strategic role, as it enables organisations to integrate applications and data scattered across different environments, creating a cohesive and easily manageable digital ecosystem.

This integration improves workflows, reduces redundancies and facilitates a completely holistic view of an organisation’s processes, offering greater efficiency and promoting business growth and innovation.

Multicloud as an ally of Middleware

Adopting a multicloud strategy reflects the search for flexibility, scalability and resilience in the use of cloud computing resources. Organisations that use multiple cloud platforms can optimise their investments by tailoring them to the specific needs of different workflows, data and even departments.

In this context, middleware plays a fundamental role, as it allows applications to function in an integrated way, regardless of the cloud providers they are using. This multicloud integration, enabled by middleware, not only maximises operational efficiency but also strengthens data security – a critical aspect for any modern digital organisation.

Benefits of multicloud integration

The multicloud integration strategy offers a series of benefits for companies, making it a key element in modern IT architecture.

multicloud-approach

Regardless of the technology you choose to use, such as Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud, for example, we’re talking about benefits such as:

• Innovation and agility: the capacity to access a variety of services and technologies can accelerate innovation, empowering companies to implement new solutions in a more agile way. Thus, they can experiment and adopt new technologies with fewer restrictions and gain greater agility to respond to different market and consumer expectations.

• Risk mitigation and increased security: through integration between different providers, it is possible to ensure a higher level of redundancy, facilitating the redirection of service in general incident situations with a specific region or cloud provider.

• Legal and compliance: organisations can choose providers with data centres located in the specific regions they intend to operate in, which makes it easier in terms of regulation and jurisdiction, and in reducing barriers to adherence to standards, exploring the most suitable services in terms of compliance.

• Cost optimisation: multicloud integration can lead to a significant reduction in operational costs, as it allows companies to use the most suitable cloud with the best cost/benefit ratio for each specific need, also allowing independence from a single provider.

Implementing middleware solutions and multicloud integration strategies is essential for companies to maximise their technological resources and take a significant step in modernising their operations. These technologies are not just facilitators of digital transformation; they are pillars that support the innovation, efficiency and security of digital organisations.

If you are looking to explore the potential of middleware and multicloud integration, contact us. Together, we can analyse your specific needs and design solutions that fit into today’s digital landscape. Don’t miss the opportunity to transform your digital strategy.

Nuno SantosMiddleware: Multicloud integration
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APIs and Cloud: more agility in integration

APIs and Cloud: more agility in integration

by Nuno Santos
2023-04-21
4 min
5 SECONDS SUMMARY:
  • A API-first strategy tends to foster the development of a more valuable product;
  • A cloud-first strategy helps simplify the operationalisation of the organisation’s day-to-day business.

In today’s world, it is unlikely that anyone does not know the term “API”, which stands for Application Programming Interface. All interaction between software is mediated by these atomic elements, which are fundamental for promoting organisational value.

However, the concept of API has evolved over time, now encompassing a set of different assumptions inherent in the technological context of the present:

  • Initially emerged as a means of abstracting the complexity of accessing data;
  • Helps promote the adoption of best practices and reuse in software design;
  • Fosters communication between distributed systems and over the internet;
  • Simplifies the challenge with its uncomplicated, high-performance approach.

Despite the temporal evolution of the term API, its greatest strength still lies in its origin.

API-First

Traditionally, the approach to software implementation is derived from a bottom-up perspective, where technical requirements and needs are defined, and an interface is designed to respond to them for the consumption of third parties. Although this approach is not necessarily wrong, it focuses more on the technical solution implemented than everyday organisational operations.

The API-first strategy arises from the requirement to better respond to business needs. By making the API – the interface – the fundamental unit of development (a first-class citizen), the software design becomes intimately linked to the business’s needs, focusing on the response it provides to the real problem that needs to be solved and opening the door for other stakeholders (business analysts and users) to interact more actively and consciously in this process.

By focusing on the API and its fundamental purpose of abstracting the technical idiosyncrasies from the provider to the consumer, we obtain multiple benefits:

  • Business focus – by breaking down the concern around the details of implementation, we shift the focus from technological solutions to business functions.
  • Reusability – when we reuse simpler functions, the composition and orchestration of more complex business functions is encouraged.
  • Scalability – the implementation of well-defined functions facilitates solution scalability and greater permeability to contextual changes.
  • Higher quality with less effort – through reuse, delivery quality is increased, and the effort of implementation is reduced.
  • Time-to-market – greater speed and better quality mean faster, more assertive responses to opportunities and threats in the organisation’s business operations.

This approach tends to result in more balanced digital products to meet the organisation’s objectives, extracting greater value and benefit from the technological solutions implemented.

Cloud-First

All organisations have different realities, needs, obligations and requirements, which demand continuously scalable and adaptable architectures. In a perfect scenario, organisations would always benefit from a complete transition to the cloud, but the reality is that a pure cloud vision does not always respond in the best way to the demands and constraints of each organisation. However, it is relevant to understand the role and importance of the cloud in addressing many of the challenges, and this is why a cloud-first approach – considering the cloud as the first development option – should be adopted.

Some of the benefits of adopting a cloud model are:

  • Resilience and elasticity: By taking advantage of new technologies and system architectures, cloud services offer various redundancy and elasticity mechanisms according to the organisation’s needs, removing the excess cost of unused infrastructure and the headache of maintaining infrastructure during periods of higher activity (whether expected or not).
  • Fair cost: In cloud architecture, there is no upfront investment, and only the services effectively consumed are charged (pay-per-use model).
  • Lower maintenance responsibility and effort: Infrastructure management and maintenance are no longer the organisation’s responsibility but rather the cloud vendor’s responsibility. To apply updates and upgrades to operating systems, services and applications (depending on the cloud model adopted).
  • Lower maintenance effort: The cloud infrastructure is designed for management simplification, promoting automation and providing various out-of-the-box functionalities for resource and service control and monitoring.
  • Greater security: Although many organisations confuse control with security, the truth is that cloud vendors have a security-focused operation. Given the criticality and scope of their services, they have internal processes based on security-by-design principles certified by various global entities. It is important to note, however, that security is always a shared responsibility because it is always the organisations that determine the rules of who accesses and how information is accessed (having a fortified door is of little use if we leave it unlocked).
  • Greater performance: The resources and services available in the cloud are optimised for the functions and tasks they are intended for, so it is expected that they will tend to present better overall performance. This is, however, a potential benefit in that it will always depend on the physical location of the resources involved, network circuit bandwidths, and the design and constraints of the solution itself.

By defining a cloud-first strategy, we are thus considering the fastest and most efficient path for delivering digital solutions for everyday business. In this cloud environment, taking advantage of all the capabilities and potentialities offered natively, APIs – and the complete management of their life cycle – thrive best.

APIs and Cloud: from theory to pratice

As we have seen, API-first and cloud-first approaches are simply ways to maximise the cost-benefit ratio in software solutions implementation. An API-first strategy tends to foster the development of a more valuable product, and a cloud-first strategy helps simplify the operationalisation of the organisation’s day-to-day business.

It is important to embrace these perspectives as an intrinsic way of thinking, designing and managing software, always bearing in mind that each initiative or development line may have specific limitations or constraints for which other approaches must be defined. A hybrid global solution will almost always be the ideal solution, so instead of considering pure approaches, it is more relevant to shift the perception of hybrid from an ‘as-is with cloud extras’ vision to a ‘cloud with legacy exceptions’ vision. It is this organisational mindset that holds the key to success.

Nuno SantosAPIs and Cloud: more agility in integration
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Cloud or hybrid solutions for your Middleware: advantages

Cloud or hybrid solutions for your Middleware: advantages

by Nuno Santos
2023-01-19
3 min
5 SECOND SUMMARY:
  • There are advantages to implementing either a cloud or hybrid solutions for your Middleware;
  • Some benefits are: Increased delivery speed of digital solutions; Increased responsiveness; Focus on innovation, among others.

The demands of a competitive and ever-changing business require organisations to equip themselves with processes and tools that give them the agility and speed of response needed to stay ahead. These days all industry sectors are – at their core or by symbiosis – deeply digital. Middleware platforms are fundamental for the implementation of digital programmes in organisations and, as such, must be moulded to the reality of the company and its operations so that they can support their growth in a sustained manner.
Since the early 1980s, middleware has undergone a profound evolution to respond better to the continuously changing landscape. Initially responding to a need for point-to-point connection and later on from a perspective within the organisation, the explosion of the Internet and the proliferation of APIs quickly created new challenges for the development and maintenance of distributed integrations, requiring the creation of new middleware tools to manage this complexity. The latest challenges are related to the adoption of the cloud and elastic granular architectures, making middleware solutions even more fundamental to organisational strategy.

The relevance of the cloud or the hybrid solutions

Migration to the cloud has been a growing trend over recent years. Several organisations are setting the cloud as a goal in their application modernisation and digital transformation strategy for its inherent benefits:
• Increased delivery speed of digital solutions, with the availability of numerous tools optimised to address different team needs and skill sets.
• Increased responsiveness to technical IT challenges, such as ensuring high availability, scalability, fault tolerance and security.
• Reduced infrastructure operation and maintenance and better management of associated costs (consumption-based models).
• Focus on innovation and initiatives that produce greater value for organisations.
This is not to say that the solution is the total transition to a public cloud. Technical constraints, compliance, legal impositions or even business benefits may require some architecture components to remain on the premises or within a private cloud. It is, however, necessary to adopt a cloud-first strategy that requires the cloud alternative to be considered upfront and to weigh up the pros and cons involved in the transition. In most cases, the ideal solution will be hybrid to be more efficient and aligned with business objectives.

Types of cloud or hybrid solutions

As organisations integrate the cloud, middleware gains an even greater role in the consistency of the ‘application fabric’ of organisations. If middleware has previously helped to simplify data integration between heterogeneous systems, a hybrid solution becomes the cornerstone for addressing the heterogeneity of the architecture. There are now different types of middleware solutions for this:
• Self-managed platforms: Platforms which, regardless of their architecture (centralised or microservice-based), are maintained by the customer in their own ecosystem. Typically they are highly customisable and offer greater freedom to be tuned to low-level technical needs, with the drawback of being more resistant to evolution and requiring a high administration effort by IT teams.
• Vendor-managed platforms: The ideal solution for eliminating the cost of platform maintenance, which can be managed in a transparent way by the respective vendors. Given that they are outsourced to the vendor’s infrastructure, they offer a similar set of functionalities to self-managed platforms but with limitations in terms of their extensibility and low-level customisation.
• iPaaS (integration Platform-as-a-Service): Specially designed for the cloud, these platforms bring together an integrated suite of different tools to enable organisations to easily integrate cloud and SaaS applications. They focus on automation, integrated experiences (one-piece vision) and low-code/no-code development to simplify the integration problem, promoting implementation by users without technical expertise (citizen developers) and, consequently, organisational agility.
As indicated earlier, the challenge of organisational integration increases with the complexity of the business and/or its architecture. This means that a single middleware platform is not always adequate. The concept of the HIP (Hybrid Integration Platform) was born out of this need. The implementation of a HIP consists of the continuous valorisation of a mixed solution of middleware pieces, combining iPaaS with other on-premise products and implementations targeted at specific integration problems (such as B2B Gateway, Managed File Transfer, API Management and IoT) under integrated management and governance, offering greater adaptability to the constant changes and needs of the business.

Final Thoughts

Competitiveness and rapid response to opportunities and threats are critical capabilities for the success of any organisation. To achieve these things, the organisation must be equipped with appropriate tools to react with agility and assertiveness. A middleware solution aligned with the strategic objectives of the organisation provides a solid base for progress and sustained development, favouring the autonomy of the teams in development, facilitating the control and integrated management of the ecosystem, and promoting innovation.

Nuno SantosCloud or hybrid solutions for your Middleware: advantages
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WSO2: a new approach to middleware

WSO2: a new approach to middleware

by Nuno Santos
2020-07-15
6 min

The integration of systems and information in organisations has been a core requirement for improving the efficiency and quality of processes, fostering and leveraging development and innovation. In the increasingly predominant context of digital transformation, technological evolution is essential for providing a rapid response to market demands and thus remains a key player in the infinite game of business. Such agility requires ever more decentralisation and autonomy, from teams, which have to become multi-disciplinary, and from increasingly objective and efficient processes, creating a body of independent communicating cells whose vitality depends strongly on the mechanisms of integration among each other.

The role that middleware plays in organisational digital strategy has been fundamental to their success for several decades. The first need was born with a growing number of systems and the need to share information among them. Then, widespread access to the world wide web offered a new integration challenge, along with the growth in mobility and the proliferation of devices with access to information. This was followed by an infrastructure abstraction, with SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) offerings and the latest cloud trend. Today we are living a period of architectural reformulation, of more scalable and flexible properties, and a focus on serverless environments and micro service-oriented architectures. Middleware has been, is, and will continue to be a constant presence and the cornerstone of this evolution, where ore the organic disintegration of architectures increasingly requires dedicated platforms for their management.

Virtue is in the middle

Integration has been a growing and increasingly complex problem for many decades. In the early days of the use of information systems in organisations (the 1970s and 1980s) the integration problem was unimpressive:

  • Organisations had just one central system (mainframe), to handle the automated execution of typical operational activities; and
  • In the event that there was a system to assist communication needs between them, it was rare and of a very limited domain, justifying point-to-point

However, since the 1990s we have seen an explosion of organisational systems, with an increasing decentralisation of information to different silos and departments in order to better meet their needs. The globalisation of Internet access and the respective evolution of communication networks have both contributed to this. Integration became a paradigm to be addressed and the concept of EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) was born, with the aim of removing this burden from the business’s application development, and to define and systematise good practices in these implementations.

The following decade – 2000 – was characterised by the exploitation of connectivity through the web, so we witnessed the birth of SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) offerings and the adoption of communication standards (e.g. SOAP). This multiplicity of service offerings required a rethinking of the good design practices of these types of architectures, as their implementation began to be characterised by a high volume of heterogeneous interfaces facilitating the exchange of messages between them. And so the ESB (enterprise service bus) was born, which is basically the instantiation of the architectural model of an EAI implementation, with the aim of giving organisations relevant properties such as abstraction, loose-coupling and reuse.

Following the proliferation of the mobile phone between 2000 and 2010, the decade after the year 2010 was characterised by the diversity and processing capacity of mobile devices, and they now play an active role in organisations as a tool for communication, work, and even leisure. In this era of multi-connectivity, the importance of being connected anywhere has become central to the competitive business market, and this has increasingly led to the promotion of services by organisations through the Internet and the creation of these new channels of value. Each and every service or system started to make APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) available for the access and consumption of consumers, whether in the organization itself or its customers and partners and allowed the creation of new channels of value for the business. This proliferation of APIs then led to a growing need for management and supply, culminating in a complementary approach to integration that is called API management. API management complements system integration as it feeds the API lifecycle (from design and testing, through publication and operation, to its depreciation), providing a central point of security and control, providing metrics and usage trends, and accelerating consumer adoption with collaborative and self-service functionality.

We are currently moving towards a paradigm of flexibility, where applications must respond to requests for information in a distributed and independent manner, with response times approximated to real time. This is a disruptive change, where monolithic architectures are converted into models based on microservices and containerisation, in an agnostic way in terms of location. Just as applications evolve in this sense, integration architectures are also mutating, with the aim of speeding up and better responding to the growing need for integration resulting from the dispersion of applications. We are thus witnessing the adoption of iPaaS (integration platform-as-a-service) – platforms that facilitate and speed up the creation of integrations between applications – as well as hybrid integration platforms – hybrid integration platforms, i.e. that work agnostically both on-premise and in the cloud as a set of communicating cells, to better respond to the needs of information exchange.

api management

The WSO2 solution: a new approach to middleware

WSO2 was founded in 2005 and develops an open-source offering of the same name, in the middleware area. The suite is composed of different products and services that facilitate a decentralised API-first approach, enabling organisations to achieve fast, agile implementation of their digital solutions. The platform consists of three attack vectors to the middleware problem:

  • API manager – leveraging the promotion and use of APIs to streamline and exploit business capabilities;
  • Enterprise integrator – facilitating the development of enterprise integration and promotes the revitalisation of legacy systems; and
  • Identity server – promoting trust and security in information access management.

Each of the products addresses a specific need for integration. The API manager empowers Full Life Cycle API Management organisations, i.e. the ability to manage APIs 360º, from their planning and design, through their operationalisation and monetisation, to their depreciation. In this way, organisations can respond effectively to business trends and the establishment of value partnerships. Using enterprise integrator it is possible to interconnect all the dispersed information of the organisation speedily and with ease, allowing organisations to explore operational efficiencies and new offers for their business. To ensure secure access to information and integrated identity management in organisations, Identity server presents itself as the tool of choice.

The differentiating factors

WSO2 presents a set of differentiating factors that distinguish them from similar offerings:

  • 100% open source – completely open source, with no anomalies in its distribution, unlike other offers based on Community and Enterprise This feature guarantees customers a unique opportunity to test and validate their final solutions at no cost. WSO2’s own development is transparent and open, allowing its customers to have full visibility and to participate actively;
  • Cloud-native – prepared and developed from scratch, to adapt to today’s decentralised IT architectures based on containers and microservices;
  • Modular – runs on a common basis of functionality, with a high level of internal cohesion, and is easily integrated into its various components;
  • Light – promotes a rationalised use of the necessary features, thus ensuring the best efficiency of the solution;
  • Flexible – facilitates integration into the organisation’s architecture, exploring the decoupling of its components so that they can be sized according to solution requirements;
  • Extensible – allows you to include customised code, both for the extension of the functionality and in the development of proprietary protocol-specific integration connectors (there are over 200 available in the connector store).

Our vision for the future

Throughout the evolution of different integration models, what we have noticed is that it has not been a substitution of concepts. Rather, we have witnessed an increasing complexity of problems and challenges that require new solutions for a better response. In our vision:

  • Any integration architecture is potentially valid, depending on the challenge it is meeting. It makes sense to adopt models that bring the greatest value to the organisation;
  • Contrary to many statements, the ESB is not in disuse. It remains a highly valid and current paradigm in what we consider to be a good integration architecture. These statements exist because often the ESB concept is mixed with the notion of a centralised backbone of integration, something that is actually in disuse in the new model of distributed architectures;
  • Integration is hybrid and consists of a combination of mixed on-premise and different cloud (multi-cloud) integration scenarios, offering flexibility and sustainability to organisational growth;
  • APIs continue to be the agents that promote integration, as they facilitate and promote access to information in a simple and fast way.

WSO2 offers a modern, versatile solution to address the pressing integration needs of organisations and support the entire transformation and innovation process. WSO2 products place in the hands of organisations the tools with which to implement an integration platform with the inherent complexity of their current objectives and shape it according to their future evolution and the context and requirements of the markets in which they operate.

Nuno SantosWSO2: a new approach to middleware
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Gamification: Myth vs. Reality

Gamification: Myth vs. Reality

by Nuno Santos
2018-10-10
5 min

First of all, let’s make it clear: no matter what you think Gamification is, it certainly isn’t the silver bullet solution for your problems. If you have a problem in your teams, processes or organisation, you should address it and evaluate the best way to fix it, because applying Gamification to a broken environment won’t solve anything (it will probably make it worse!)

Having said that… what is Gamification then? And how can I better apply it?

This post is not intended to go deep into the definition and concepts of Gamification but rather to provide a better understanding of Gamification by identifying common myths in many people’s visions of it.

The myths

1st myth: Gamification is transforming something into a game

There is a generalised idea that something is gamified when you are playing a game. That is inaccurate. The majority of the time you are playing games, you are not in a gamified environment.

Creating a game is a separate line of study, called Game Design. Game Design focuses on designing a game by creating a plot, the characters, the mechanics, an evolution, game play interaction, etc., and putting those in a confined environment (the game) where the user (player) actively participates, evolves and, hopefully, succeeds. It is more like creating a new challenge a giving the player the tools to face it.

Gamification, even though it shares similar benefits, is addressing real world challenges with what we learn from games. It is the process of applying game elements and game design techniques to non-game contexts, with the objective of engaging and motivating people by making their real world tasks more fun.

At an enterprise level, for example, Gamification can be used to on-board and engage team members, enhance productivity and efficiency, train people, and innovate.

2nd myth: Applying Gamification will make things at least as engaging as they were

Although FUN is one of the simple and clear words that describes the objective of Gamification, it is also a very vague and relative concept. When not applied correctly, game elements and techniques may create the opposite effect of what was intended. That is why sometimes people see far worse results after applying Gamification initiatives to the environment as opposed to not applying any.

Bear in mind that engagement has to do, among other things, with voluntariness and choice. Forcing people to do something negates the effects of a Gamification strategy.

3rd myth: If I understand Game Design, I understand Gamification

If this is your motto, then you’ve been living in a dream world. Although sharing similar elements and techniques, as said earlier, Gamification is far more about the psychology than the actual product. Game Design is more focused on creating the game and all its elements in a way that is appealing and involving to the player, whereas Gamification is especially concerned with affecting human behaviour to achieve a specific outcome. It is intended to provide a long-term and sustainable benefit rather than entertainment per se.

4th myth: Gamification = PBL (points, badges and leaderboards)

If you are not new to Gamification, you probably know that when gamifying, people tend to apply PBL straightforwardly, probably because this is the most common and visible aspect of a gamified environment. Although in many cases PBL are present, the scope of the Gamification initiative goes far beyond these elements. You have to free your mind from vanilla PBL application and start to think about how you can get more out of Gamification.

You should start from the top, by thinking about how you will affect the users with the experience: things like emotions, a narrative, a progression, etc., that support the behaviours that you wish to achieve. Then you can start to consider the mechanics, the processes that drive the user – like challenges, competition/cooperation, feedback, rewards, win states, and many others – so that you create a meaningful experience. And to achieve those, you can use PBL and any other elements (achievements, avatars, collections, levels, virtual goods, etc…) as tools that you have at your disposal to implement your strategy.

5th myth: Gamification doesn’t work

This is a little bit farfetched, but sometimes people don’t believe in Gamification just because of past experiences gone wrong. It’s true that Gamification doesn’t fit all scenarios and, for the ones it does, it should be applied and managed correctly to get the desired outcomes (welcome to the real world!) Always evaluate all possibilities and consider the pros and cons of any Gamification implementation initiative. Don’t be afraid to cast out Gamification when you think it will not benefit your context or it might create significant risks. As discussed at the beginning, this is not a panacea or a certified results procedure. The context must be set up, and the implementation is a journey of adoption and change, so it takes time and care to succeed.

A little bit of the psychology behind Gamification

There is a lot that can be discussed on the psychology and behavioural side of Gamification.

Its core is about understanding people’s behaviour (Behaviorism), by analysing what people do in response to stimulus:

  • By providing feedback, people tend to correct and adjust behaviour accordingly;
  • Creating consequences or giving rewards based on their actions helps to guide them to the intended behaviour;
  • Randomly shooting their dopamine system with something unexpected makes them feel good and more engaged.

Because the Behaviourist approach is limited, Gamification is also going deeper and understanding what people feel and think (Cognitivism), by trying to determine the motivation behind the action. Motivation can be:

  • Extrinsic, when the action is done for the purpose of the reward (e.g. fame, money, etc.), which can demotivate and is not sustainable;
  • Intrinsic, when doing the thing for its own sake, because it is rewarding and enjoyable by itself, thus creating much more engagement.

Pitfalls of Gamification

There are several pitfalls and dangers associated with bad Gamification use.

One of the dangers concerns abusing or manipulating people into having specific behaviours. Remember that Gamification is about freedom of choice, so any military-like enforcement of behaviour will push people away instead of bringing them in.

An additional pitfall is what in Gamification is known as instant gratification. Instant gratification relies on consistently rewarding someone for a simple achievement – like, for example, submitting a suggestion through a form. This devalues the reward and potentially leads people to disregard what is really important (the suggestion) just for the purpose of getting more rewards (with more clicks).

Another bad use of Gamification is when you expose people or set them “playing” against each other. An example of this might be the implementation of leaderboards in an organisation, showing points and/or rating people in “who is better than whom” and “who are the worst performers” reports. This potentially promotes a bad environment between co-workers and can create entropy and demotivation within teams.

Good Gamification examples

The following is a selection of good examples of the application of Gamification that succeeded in achieving their goals and the desired behavioural pattern:

Gamification Description Achievements Why it worked?
Volkswagen’s speed limit enforcement in Stockholm Induce responsible driving behaviour by implementing a lottery between drivers respecting the city speed limits with the money collected from fines of over-speeding drivers. Resulted in 22% average speed reduction. Probably because people didn’t need to speed in the first place. Creating a reward for doing it within the speed limits raised awareness (feedback) and created a new motivation for people to drive by.
StackOverflow’s contribution mechanism Make Stack Overflow ‘the’ relevant reference for asking help and finding answers on specific technology topics (mainly programming). How many times do you end up on Stack Overflow’s website when searching for a specific technology issue resolution? That explains it all. It promotes a sense of community, by rewarding meaningful contributions and giving voice to the entire user community (feedback and revision system).
Duolingo Website and app that eases the process of learning new languages. Made language learning easier and now has more than 68 languages available and 200 million users worldwide. Received several educational and learning technology prizes. It is easy and simple; it provides constant feedback; it gives freedom for you to choose your own pace; it gives options on which area you want to focus next; it rewards you more when you put more pace or effort into it; it gives you lingots (the Duolingo currency) as rewards for you to unlock other challenges and learn more.

Nuno Santos

Enterprise Solutions Manager, Xpand IT

Nuno SantosGamification: Myth vs. Reality
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