Reviving Legacy Systems with API Integration

⇨ Cloud adoption has taken the industry by storm with SAP introducing the ECC deadline and doubling down on the importance of innovation just a few months ago at UKISUG.

⇨ The question arises, is there a way to adapt to changing market needs by leveraging legacy systems?

⇨ Google Cloud is one example of a company boasting the benefits of APIs.

Cloud adoption has taken the industry by storm with SAP introducing the ECC deadline and doubling down on the importance of innovation just a few months ago at UKISUG 2023. However, it is not as simple for some SME companies. Some just do not have it in the budget or face a brick wall when it comes to convincing leadership to invest in new systems.

The question arises – is there a way to adapt to changing market needs by leveraging legacy systems?

Legacy back ends hold critical data that is required for client applications and must be unlocked in order to be scaled out to new cloud services and apps. With an API management platform, users can add security, analytics and scalability to legacy services.

Legacy applications and services include important data that can enable new mobile, web and voice experiences for users. In order to do this quickly, organizations can modernize legacy services via RESTful interfaces, unlocking them to be consumed by new cloud services and apps.

Google Cloud is one example of a company boasting the benefits of APIs. An API abstraction and modernization layer insulates client-facing applications from shifting backend services.

APIs can speed up time to market by leveraging existing legacy systems to bring new offerings and services to customers. Organizations can deliver dynamic customer experiences by building and delivering modern, mobile, web and other voice applications and connected experiences for users, partners and employees.

Providing partners and external developers with API-based service access will also enable smoother onboarding and easier development.

Putting the solution into play, Google Cloud helped Nationwide Insurance transform its IT shared services organization through an API-first business strategy across the company by implementing Google’s Apigee API Management Platform. The organization required modernization of many of its backend systems. This involved a technology change as well as re-imagining business processes to take advantage of emerging technologies.

Implementing an API management platform has increased Nationwide’s insight into its IT value proposition. By moving to a product-based model and away from the old application and asset ownership perspective, the company has transformed how it measures its development process. Nationwide now looks at what outcome teams want to drive comes before creating a solution to do it, followed by measuring whether or not the expected value has been achieved.

Rick Schnierer, AVP, One IT Applications Business Solutions, Nationwide Insurance, said: “What used to take us two to three months to develop as a monolithic service now takes days as a microservice. Apigee has also allowed us to federate development, meaning our developers are empowered to create and share APIs on their own rather than going through a centralized model.”