Charlotte Tyrer

API management is a collection of processes that allows a company to manage and monitor the APIs that connect apps and data across the enterprise and across clouds. To assist a business in getting the most out of their API solutions. API management tools often include a developer portal, an API gateway, API lifecycle management, analytics tools, and support for API monetisation.

Whatever you’ve been working on, if it requires an API, you’re probably already aware of some of the functions that API administration can perform. API Management is the group of functions or features that aid with creating, securing, monitoring, and supporting of APIs and the services that power them.

API management services are available as SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions in the cloud, on-premises in a private cloud, or via a hybrid cloud strategy. It’s one of those technologies that quickly become necessary for creating, protecting, publishing, and maintaining APIs. If you’re reading this, you’re either unfamiliar with API Management or have a hazy understanding and wish to learn more. You’ve arrived at the right page!

Why Would You Want to Use an API Management Platform?

There are a number of compelling reasons to use an API Management system, including:

Security Concerns Are Easier to Establish and Maintain

As more APIs are developed, security gets more complicated. As more services are developed, the security measures utilised may differ based on the developer, team, or department.

This puts more pressure on developers to adhere to current organizational norms, but it also puts an additional burden on support and maintenance teams, who may need to be aware of all of the unique implementations.

Coding and Service Simplification

When you use an APIM solution, you may design your services to accomplish only what is required and manage them outside of the codebase. Security, rate limitation, and transformations do not need to be baked into the code.

This means that the services are easier to manage since they are simpler, and that the API administration is likewise easy to configure, and that it can be deployed to both new and old APIs quickly and universally.

By abstracting the security layer from the API service and relocating it to the APIM layer, these worries are alleviated, and providing effective and uniform security throughout the API portfolio becomes much easier, less expensive, and less likely to result in security breaches due to developer errors.

A Better Understanding of API Usage

Another area where metrics, reporting, and monitoring can grow more complicated as more APIs are established is metrics, reporting, and monitoring. If you don’t have a precise measure of this vital information, it can have an impact on things like:

1. Customer/user happiness is harmed as a result of latency, which has a negative impact on the user experience.
2. Current system difficulties are being recognized.
3. Due to a lack of knowledge about the actual amount of traffic/errors APIs are facing, support budgets may be insufficient.
4. Poor metric collecting and reporting has a slew of other consequences.

Related post: The API Economy: Growth through Interconnectivity

What Is the Value of API Management?

API management is primarily concerned with centralized control of your APIs, which includes analytics, access control, revenue, and developer workflows. API management combines reliable, flexible, high-quality, and quick solutions.

At the very least, an API management solution should include access control, rate limitations, and usage regulations to meet these aims and ensure that both public and internal APIs are consumable and safe. The following features are commonly seen in API management solutions:

Data Analysis

It’s critical to understand what’s going on with your APIs, including which consumers or apps are calling particular API and how frequently. It’s also crucial to understand how many APIs have failed and why they failed.

API Monetisation Is Supported

Use contracts to monetize access to the microservices powering the APIs. API management enables you to create use contracts based on metrics like API calls. Users can be categorised and assigned to different access tiers, and different standards of quality can be provided to various sections.

Management of the API Lifespan

APIs should be managed from start to finish, from design to deployment through decommissioning.

A Portal for Developers

For API management, a developer portal is a popular best practice. API documentation, as well as developer onboarding activities such as signup and account management, are often available through developer portals.

A Gateway for APIs

For all customers, the API gateway serves as a single point of access. Through the application of policies, the gateway also controls how clients interact with APIs.

These features are taken into account during API development so that traffic control, security, and access policy enforcement can be provided by self-managed or cloud components. On an infrastructure platform designed for performance, customer control, and future expansion, well-crafted APIs can be shared, secured, distributed, regulated, and monetised.

Related post: The Future of Insurance APIs

How Do I Assess the Effectiveness of My API Management Efforts?

Consider these 5 key API performance objectives when defining success in your organisation:

Quality

The consistent compliance of the API’s behaviour to developer expectations is referred to as quality. It’s a means of gauging how happy developers are with the API.

Dependability

Dependency means developer access to the API. Downtime is an important statistic for determining reliability. Another measure is quota, which specifies how many API calls a developer can make in a given amount of time. A quota protects an API against misuse while also making management easier.

Speed

Access latency and throughput can be used to assess speed. Techniques like throttling and caching can be used to control speed.

Cost

The purpose of cost estimation is to provide developers the most bang for their buck. The other four objectives all contribute to the cost of the APIM in some way.

Flexibility

When it comes to API adoption, flexibility refers to the alternatives available to developers. Greater API flexibility necessitates more effort (and money) on the part of the entity in charge of the API.

APIs and API management is becoming a more essential component of many modern businesses. A unified API management solution should be used by any business that uses APIs or relies on them to offer services.

APIs really aren’t new, but with the growth of applications and services required in the digital world, as well as new customer-centric IT organisations, firms across all business sectors demand better API management solutions today more than ever before.

Related post: APIs on FHIR: Are We Close to Reaching Global Healthcare Interoperability?

API Strategy & Product Selection

We can help forge your API strategy with consultative product selection, through unmatched proficiency of integration technology. Using our API Platform Capability Matrix below, you can ensure that your organisation’s short, middle and long-term goals are aligned with the right solution.

Are You Looking for an API Management Solution You Can Trust?

Prolifics UK specialises in connecting applications like Salesforce and SAP to your legacy systems. API services connect in days for secure innovation and faster delivery. Providing API Assessments from architecture to operations, we will assess the key areas of your organisation’s API and integration capabilities and produce an actionable report.

We can also provide you with everything from frameworks to code management as well as security testing & deployment resources – all delivered on-demand at a fraction of what it would cost internally. To get started, contact us today.

Start Your Transformation

You may be hearing this term for the first time, but it’s not a new idea. The Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) we know today was originally conceived by architect Gregor Hohpe in 2000. Back then, he called it an enterprise service router.

It’s a concept that has been around for quite some time and is becoming more popular as companies are trying to make their systems more agile and responsive to changes in the marketplace.

What does ESB do? Essentially, what an ESB does is help connect two different departments or business processes together so they can communicate with each other using shared data. The goal of an Enterprise Service Bus is to create connections between disparate IT services and applications within your organization without requiring code changes.

What Exactly is ESB?

The ESB is a messaging system that enables companies to connect their applications, which leads to more efficiency and scalability. It’s also relevant for organizations with complex IT needs.

The ESB can be seen as the “glue” of your company’s IT infrastructure. The glue allows you to keep all of your company’s data in a single place without having it spread apart across different systems. For example, if your company uses Salesforce but has an application like SharePoint that tracks customer data, then the ESB will enable these two applications to talk to one another so they don’t have duplicate data entry points or information lost in translation between them.

An ESB is not a product. It’s an architecture; it’s a set of rules and principles for integrating numerous applications together over bus-like infrastructure, like the Internet or Ethernet (ESBs are also sometimes called “enterprise app integration” products). Products from different vendors vary in how they provide this service to you—the way that each does it varies significantly–and what capabilities they offer.

Three Architectures of ESB

ESB stands for Enterprise Service Bus, and is a technology designed to provide enterprises with integration capabilities. ESBs are typically used by companies that have complex enterprise applications that need to interact with each other.

The architecture of the ESB will determine how easy it is for these applications to communicate with one another. There are three main architectures: client-server, publish-subscribe and synchronous. Below are the three architectures and their pros/cons in more detail so you can make an informed decision about which one best fits your needs!

1. Client Server Architecture

This is the most common architecture for ESBs. A bus (typically a TCP/IP connection) runs between the communicating applications, and messages are sent back and forth over that bus. This approach can work great if you have relatively simple needs – but as your requirements grow more complex it becomes difficult to manage everything through one central point on the network.

2. Publish Subscribe Architecture

In publish subscribe architectures, there’s typically no centralized server or hub where all communication takes place – instead each application acts independently from every other so they don’t need to communicate with any outside entity at all! The downside of this design is when two different apps want to send data updates to ALL applications listening; these types of requests are typically addressed using the “publish-subscribe model” which can be complex to set up and manage.

3. Synchronous Architecture

This is a newer approach, but it’s growing in popularity because of its simplicity! The architecture uses a message bus that all applications connect to – so whenever any application needs to send or receive data from another app (or vice versa), they do it automatically without having to worry about managing anything themselves. It makes things easier for developers, but if you have very different apps with complicated rules for communication then this might not be an ideal choice for your environment.

ESBs are a way to connect different software applications, which makes it easier for organizations with many different business units. This ability is thanks to the three architectures of an Enterprise Service Bus that exist today. If you’re not sure what the differences between these architectures are or you just want some help crafting your own ESB implementation strategy, we can give you a hand!

Are You Looking for an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Implementation Team You Can Trust?

Prolifics, a global digital transformation company, is here to help businesses take charge of their future. With expertise in everything from cloud computing and data analytics to DevOps tools and integration & APIs services for various industries across the globe, Prolifics has been providing digital solutions since 2006 all under one roof.

We provide fast turnarounds on whatever our clients need – whether that’s initial advising or implementation with ongoing analysis – so they can grow without worry about how it will be done. Vision to Value. Faster. Interested in learning more? Contact Prolifics UK today.

Start Your Transformation

High Tech businesses such as manufacturers, subscription services, consumer electronics creators and value-added resellers suffer from the same issues as other industries around how to innovate.  Innovation is difficult because of siloed systems, data and a lack of interconnectivity; this is often due to one common culprit, integration.  

Despite their name, High Tech businesses frequently suffer from the same issues as other industries, of legacy solutions, point to point integration and manual processing, this can be far removed from the glamour of ‘high-tech’, and makes the evolution of digital transformation slow and laboured, stopping them from reaching:  

• Direct to Customer solutions  
• Rapid Onboarding of partners and suppliers  
• Business-as-a-service  
• Templated M&A processes  
• A single source of truth  

Businesses often muddle along, but as their data, services and offerings grow, the web of integrations only gets bigger, more tightly coupled and harder to manage, exacerbating issues and giving the IT team a bigger headache than when they started, so it’s no surprise that teams now spend 80% of their time integrating instead of innovating. 

Naturally, this poses the question, how do you stop integrating and start innovating?  

The answer is simple, removing the delivery gap and changing your traditional integration approach to a modern, agile methodology which places innovation and data-sharing in the hands of APIs, to catalyse change.  

How do we know? Our High-Tech client had a similar use case where customer onboarding was slowing down their business. Here’s how we helped:   

First, we implemented MuleSoft’s AnyPoint Platform to provide a scalable API-Led integration backbone which allowed for the integration of system APIs, automating the end to end process for customer onboarding, this led to:  

• Removal of manual data input for new clients, reducing human error.  
• The enablement of digital and mobile applications, supporting collaboration between lines of business.  
• Improved responsiveness to customer demands due to faster messaging.  
• Enhanced reuse of assets via easily consumable APIs, removing vendor lock-in.  

Our client journey has since continued their journey, introducing automation to their processes, empowering their team by focussing on innovation rather than integration; serving their customers more efficiently. 

To find out how to overcome your integration headaches and move towards an API-Led architecture, join us and MuleSoft at our Lunch and Learn on the 2nd November, as we delve further into our client case study, alongside hearing from the experts at MuleSoft about their Customer 360 solution. 

Register Here.

There is an old Chinese proverb: “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The next best time is today.”

The same can be said for Master Data Management (MDM).

“MDM is a journey, it’s not a project,” said Mario Bourassa, Prolifics’ Practice Lead for MDM. “It’s not a point in time. It’s something that starts, and the end goal is usually several years and several phases down the road.”

At its simplest, MDM is the ability to consolidate, from different sources, data and information related to a specific item into one “golden record” that represents the whole truth for that item throughout the enterprise.

How does MDM help? Companies fighting to stay competitive are undergoing a digital transformation – part of which is updating systems that trap data, don’t communicate well, and perpetuate data errors.

As relayed by one of our clients: “We weren’t sure of our data’s quality, where it came from, where it was going, who had access to it and how it was being used.” MDM will help:

• Create one, integrated and unified view of your data – shared by all systems and people
• Get data into the hands of those who need it – when, where and how they need it

What is Master Data?

Master Data is the high-value, core information used to support critical business processes across your enterprise. It is information about customers, suppliers, partners, products, materials, employees, accounts and more – master data is at the heart of every business transaction, application and decision.

Mario Bourassa is Prolifics’ Practice Lead for MDM. “All data is important, but not all data is master data. Master data is really the data for which there should be only one record of it in the entire organisation. For example, take a product that a company sells. There should be only one ‘golden record’ for a given product – its specifications and so on – that should be the only one ‘truth’ for that given product.”

Bourassa contrasts master data with transactional data. While also important, transactional data is, obviously, different for each transaction. Each transaction draws from and uses master data. For example, a specific customer (one record) buys a specific product (one record) from a specific store location (one record) that generates the sales transaction data.

The problem is that master-type data gets into an organisation from different sources in different ways. Information can get siloed in different systems, data entry errors can happen, data can be replicated or shared to different areas or departments where it’s then changed. Is Katie Brown who shops at a retailer’s mall store the same person as Kathleen Brown who shops the same retailer online?

Once multiple systems and variances arise, that master data is harder to manage, and the golden record becomes more and more elusive.

Paths to the Golden Record

In beginning the MDM journey, most organisations find themselves in one of two more common architectural styles, “registry,” or the more advanced “coexistence.” The ultimate MDM destination architecture is labeled “transaction” style.

Bourassa said, “When a client starts their master data journey, it’s good for them to be aware of these architectures, as they would most likely be either in the registry or coexistent style. The difference really is sometimes a little bit fuzzy anyway. What we at Prolifics highly stress is working with customers to create a strategy and a roadmap for their MDM. So, in your strategy and your roadmap, you need to talk about how you’re going to start here, and how you’re going to evolve and move ahead to transactional.”

Registry

• Each record, with its attributes, exists in a source system
• Those records can be assembled dynamically by MDM to form a single entity in a composite view
• After that initial configuration, users continue to change data on the source systems
• The changes to the source system data are reflected in the entity composite view that is stored in the MDM database
• Just enough information to match and provide linkages between similar and matching records are loaded
• It then provides a trusted view of this information to the user on demand
• However, a single view of the entity is provided but modifications to master data continue to be made on the source systems

Coexistence

• An entity with its attributes starts in a source system.
• Those entities are centralised by MDM to form a single record in the MDM database
• That single record represents the person, organisation or object
• But, even after data from the source systems is consolidated within the MDM database, business users still change the data in the source systems
• Often, in a registry style, the MDM database can be enriched with data attributes for which the MDM database is the system of record.

Transaction

• In the Transaction style, master data is entered and authored in MDM and pushed to the source systems
• All information relevant to providing a single view is now stored in the MDM repository
• MDM becomes the system of record for centrally managing master data – the golden records – from that point forward

“When you’re starting in your MDM journey, typically you would start on the left-hand side, trying to achieve the right-hand side. The right-hand side is talked about a lot. It’s very difficult. But it’s the ultimate goal. This is where you want to be.” – Mario Bourassa.

“So, in order to start an MDM program, you need to sit down, step back, and plan it. That’s what the MDM strategy is about,” said Bourassa. “And if you achieve the Transaction architectural style, that means that you do have one system that is the system of record for all of the records for a given domain, and that every change in that record goes in that system first, and then gets propagated everywhere else.”

MDM in Action- Prolifics Client Success Story

This national bank knew it had a problem – huge amounts of data spread across more than 1,500 systems. The bank wasn’t sure of the data’s quality, where it came from, where it was going, who had access to it and how it was being used. Knowing that previous modernization initiatives had failed, the bank made a bold goal: “Become the best digital bank in the industry through a transactional master data management (MDM) platform for client data.” Read what happened here.

Tech Advancements and MDM

Organisations working with MDM are starting to incorporate artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) into the process. A company can use AI/ML to help improve the data inside MDM, and ease the work of maintaining that data, by basically having the system learn how to manage data. As you correct your data and as you improve your data, you could use AI/ML to learn new rules to better manage the data.

MDM uses a lot of relationships, so many organisations are going toward graphical databases, which are better for data retrieval and the relationship analysis of highly connected data. Related to that, organisations are moving more and more data to the cloud, including master data (which used to be a taboo subject for the cloud) and the MDM itself.

Integrating Data Governance with the MDM Strategy

For Prolifics, data governance is a holistic approach to implementing practices, processes, roles, controls, and metrics to ensure the formal management of data – all designed to treat data as the valuable asset it is. Effective data governance creates a top-down guidance that steers all efforts.

The data governance and MDM go hand-in-hand together. A well-thought master data project should have data governance included in it. Data governance is basically going to dictate what you’re going to put in your master data, how you’re going to manage it, how you’re going to handle events like exceptions, errors and corrections.

“So, if you omit data governance, you’re going to be missing a piece of MDM,” said Bourassa. “It needs to be part of a well thought master data strategy, because that’s what dictates what you need to implement in terms of rules, in terms of enforcement, in your master data management repository.

Data governance will help make sure that everybody has a good understanding of what is master data and what’s in the master data, and how you use it. So, it gives a common understanding across your organisation.”

So, is it your time for Master Data Management? Prolifics can help.

Prolifics experience in MDM has led us to five key elements of a successful MDM process:

1. 1. Successful MDM work is done incrementally – don’t try to “boil the ocean” out of the gate
   2. Identify low hanging fruit – find a compelling business reason and start with a point solution
   3. Time to implement is critical – you need small successes quickly
   4. Plan to promote successes internally – building interest, support and momentum
   5. Establish an enterprise governance committee – since no one line of business “owns” everything

“I don’t think I’ve encountered a single customer that came to me with the exact same reason for pursuing a new MDM engagement,” said Bourassa. “Very often, clients come to us with their tactical perspective – with data symptoms. Eventually, you boil it down to the broad topic of data inconsistency, and for the company to move forward, do more and grow bigger, they’ll need to have a different architecture for their data – and MDM comes into play.

“And that’s when you’d like to elevate the customer’s conversation to the strategic, to show it’s worth sitting down and having one of our Prolifics workshops with us. We’ll get to the bigger picture and the related issues. It doesn’t mean that the customer needs to commit to solve all of those issues. It doesn’t mean that the customer needs to fulfill the entire strategy in the short term. But it always helps to have a bigger picture and a roadmap to get there.

“Our workshops generate a roadmap to solve the bigger strategic problems. Again, it doesn’t mean a need to solve everything. We could start together by solving some tactical issues – the symptoms. But the roadmap is helpful even in implementing tactical solutions – so you don’t have to redo it several years down the road.”

Prolifics provides MDM customers with:

• An implementation roadmap that minimises project and organisational risk while accelerating value realisation
• A deep expertise in the strengths and weaknesses of various architectural approaches
• A true understanding of the organisational impacts of mastering many types of data
• Our developed series of best practices that accelerate time to value while reducing project risks
• A solution aligned with the business drivers, taking into consideration the current organisational framework
• Our goal of on time and on budget delivery

Prolifics partner with RSA House 

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM, January 5, 2022 – London Software Engineering company Prolifics worked with venue RSA House and local charity, The Connection at St Martin in The Fields, to provide food for the homeless over the Christmas season.

The Connection supports frontline workers across the UK and strives to ensure that everyone experiencing homelessness can secure – and keep – a safe place to live. The organisation had been hit severely by pandemic protocols, closing their day centre on Adelaide Street in March 2020. Since then, The Connection has worked on providing alternative shelter, food and stability to hundreds of vulnerable individuals and front-line workers

Prolifics often employs the  teamed with RSA House, a corporate, wedding and private venue hire in central London, after their event with MuleSoft, and was subsequently introduced to The Connection through them.

Paul Waite from The Connection said, “I’d like to pass on our grateful thanks to Prolifics, who agreed to share their food with us. There will be some very happy and well-fed rough sleepers in our building over the next few days.”

Frank Mulligan, Prolifics UK General Manager, said, “We were happy to help out The Connection in this small way during the holidays. We value their work in the community and appreciate RSA House bringing them to our attention.”

Prolifics, a global digital transformation leader, is pleased to announce that the Prolifics’ robotic process automation (RPA) and intelligent document processing (IDP) solution “IntelliDocs for Healthcare” won the grand prize at the prestigious IBM Build a Bot Challenge for best RPA solution.

This IBM Build a Bot event, held between Dec. 15 and Jan. 31, was subtitled “Automation for the Common Good,” and challenged participants to broaden the vision of what RPA can do, specifically in collaboration with data sources, artificial intelligence (AI), and systems like business rules, document processing and workflow. The event drew more than 2,100 sign-ups, 70 envisioned projects, and 35 IBM robotic process automation applications submitted. IBM saw participation from 116 countries and engagement from business partners, customers, other technology firms, and academia. Prolifics is an IBM Platinum Business Partner.

Our grand prize-winning entry, “IntelliDocs,” is a digital worker solution that automates the healthcare prior authorization process. Prior authorization is normally a time-consuming, inefficient, and error-prone process that often leaves physicians and patients in limbo. IntelliDocs extracts and classifies data from authorization forms, checking for accuracy; enters the information into the payer’s electronic health records system; provides status updates and hotline support via chat and phone. The result is less data-entry time, less manual work, fewer errors, and lower administrative costs, with patients getting the treatments they need, faster.

Salem Hadim is Prolifics’ Head of Intelligent Automation Consulting Practice. “We’re very proud of this achievement, and it reflects Prolifics’ leadership in the AI Powered Business Automation and Intelligent Automation space,” said Hadim. “Many thanks go to our digital engineering teams that brought our ideas and designs to life with this winning solution”

A second Prolifics submission, called “Hope,” won the third-place prize. Hope is an AI powered, automated mental health assessment tool. Companies use Hope to collect survey data through forms or chat sessions. The program analyzes the data and uses a scientifically proven scoring system to identify and contact those who could use assistance – with early detection being the key to better outcomes.

Prolifics’ third submission, “ResuMan,” made the finalist list. ResuMan is an AI powered candidate screening tool that automates the application review process. It collects applicant and job posting data, applies machine learning to filter the information, and then matches the right candidate with the right job.

All three submissions show the expertise of our digital engineers in addressing real-world issues with advanced automation and AI applications. You can see the IntelliDocs entry video, the Hope entry video, and the ResuMan entry video. Learn more about our business automation capabilities.

Saying that the world of IT is fast moving, is an understatement; new projects, solutions and innovations are always on the horizon, providing IT teams with a duality of being eager to constantly improve, while balancing workloads to manage their ‘as is’ technology estate, throw-in software updates, bug-fixes and software testing and the fine balance between innovation and maintenance is skewed, leaving organisations losing the battle.  The mundane maintenance of core IT stifles innovation before it takes its first breath.

Here we explore the ever-growing world of Managed IT Services, and why they are becoming so crucial to organisations across the world, the impact this has on revenue and the innovation that can arise from finding the right Managed Service Provider (MSP).

IT Managed Services Save You Time

No matter your budget, time is a commodity that is in short-supply, especially in IT – being able to quickly react to changing landscapes or customer demands requires agility and the bandwidth to take on new projects; this is often not the case for internal IT teams, as their current resources are at capacity, looking after what already exists or is soon to be deployed, placing IT Management, CTOs and CIOs in a quandary – drop everything and start innovating, or maintain what is currently available and forgo innovation until things calm down.

Our experience shows the latter is often the common choice, not ‘rocking the boat’ is a safe bet for obvious reasons but being left behind by more agile competitors has less than desirable consequences in the long-term. Managed Services Providers (MSPs) are keen to change this and give you the time required to innovate by:

Removing Time Consuming Maintenance

Updates, patches and day to day management is essential to how your businesses technology functions, however, this maintenance is a task many internal teams feel like they could do without – especially if the software or application is proprietary, meaning that specific sets of skills are to be recruited by the organisation, becoming a task within itself.

Diagnose Issues Faster

A dedicated Managed Service team with experience in discovering problem areas are far more likely to find bugs than those who aren’t. Using a Managed Service Provider means that thorough diagnosis, potential issues are resolved faster.

Note: Prolifics employ our end-to-end QA solutions to improve diagnosis.

Less Time Hiring Staff

Rather than hiring staff specifically to manage legacy software, Managed Services help improve your ROI by having these resources readily available, therefore removing the need to look backwards, and instead providing a focus towards innovation. Why ‘skill-up’ staff on a software that’s no longer part of your organisation’s strategic direction.

IT Managed Services Save You Money

IT budgets aren’t exhaustive, so ensuring the best value for money throughout everything your team does, is essential. As organisations look to Managed Services post COVID-19 in an effort to streamline costs, this route to team augmentation is a viable option to quickly enlist skilled staff, without breaking the bank.

Specialist Skills, Reasonable Costs

As new projects are constantly being commissioned, some of which encompass new technologies or processes, finding the right staff at the right time can be tricky; specialist IT Managed Service Providers often have a cohort of well-trained experts, that can be used on a project-by-project basis, to suit most budgets.

“Prolifics ensures that Managed Service staff have real, client-facing experience before being placed on projects, compared to other SIs, who use graduates.”

24x7x365 Onshore Support for Less

Finding onshore staff that are security-cleared (SC) and can actively monitor your systems is a huge cost that many organisations are finding hard to accept, some believe it is overkill, however, as many have experienced, downtime is never good and could deal a serious blow to profitability. Using a Managed Service Partner allows for a subsidised pricing model with a guarantee of reducing or stopping downtime all together.

Blended Managed Services Model

Organisations often want the security of a UK-based Managed Service provider, while also requiring the power of an offshore or nearshore team to complete projects. This can often be expensive and is shared between multiple companies, increasing the price, and reducing the accountability.

Prolifics offer a blended Managed Service model that allows for the best of all (3) worlds- onshore, offshore and nearshore, providing a service to reduce the cost of team augmentation.

Managed Services Mitigate IT Risk

Downtime, security attacks and data breaches spring to mind when speaking about IT risk- they’re sometimes unavoidable, however, reducing the likelihood of this happening is essential for customer privacy, satisfaction, regulatory compliance and profitability.

Ensuring Business Continuity

Imperative in modern organisations, a strong and thorough business continuity plan must have the correct resourcing to undertake issues swiftly. Working with a Managed Service partner ensures that an end-to-end approach is undertaken, limiting risk and having a strong plan to quickly bounce back.

Best Practice

Enterprise IT is laden with guidelines, Quality Assurance (QA), and vendor best practice, this can sometimes be a minefield for the uninitiated and can be the crux of introducing risk to IT systems. Working alongside a trusted Managed Service partner with certified skills in software, strong governance and processes around QA and security ensures that risk is mitigated.

Industry Compliance

As industries evolve and adapt to changing demands, the compliance that must be undertaken in keeping systems, software and data secure and compliant with government or industry mandates requires both industry and technical proficiency. A Managed Service provider prepares the necessary steps to compliance, working closely with business leaders to reach true compliance.

2022, The Year of Innovation

Time, money and risk, have a direct impact on what projects you undertake, why they’re undertaken and if you’re able to complete them before another shift to the industry or business landscape. Managed Services are quick becoming the ‘secret sauce’ in transformation projects, providing organisations with the assistance they need, exactly when they need it, opening the door for innovation and in turn, a less stressed IT team.

Regardless of where your team are based, the ‘new normal’ ensures that IT departments can connect and work on projects with greater efficiency than ever before; this leads to 2022 becoming a catalyst for innovation and new solutions to empower enterprise IT.

As you look to compete with accelerated modernisation efforts and customer-centric projects, ensuring you have the right team by your side is imperative to success. Prolifics can offer a variety of Managed Services across technologies and vendors- use the calculator today and begin your journey with a trusted partner.

Prolifics Wins Four at the 2021 ICMG Awards for Global Digital Architecture Excellence

LONDON, UK., March 21, 2022 – Digital Engineering consultancy, Prolifics Inc., won four accolades in the 2021 ICMG Annual Global Awards for Architecture Excellence, held in New York earlier this year.

The awards encompass four individual competencies, including the Global Award for “Best Digital Architecture in IT Services,” Regional Awards for “Business Intelligence and Analytics,” and “Best Software Architecture in IT Products,” and team and leadership recognition awards. The shortlist featured a strong selection of finalists with more than 200 projects, from 27 countries and four rounds of evaluations for entries. The win propels Prolifics into an elite group of distinguished and highly respected global winners.

Speaking on the accomplishments, Prolifics CEO, Satya Bolli, said, “It is a great honour for Prolifics to be recognized for one of the most prestigious and coveted awards from the ICMG global architecture panel. With this award, Prolifics has achieved an important milestone in driving digital transformation and promoting digitalisation in enterprises globally.

“I am confident that our organization will demonstrate great tenacity in setting a very high benchmark in delivering on promises in the field of Digital Engineering in the future. This recognition helps strengthen Prolifics’ position as a leading global provider of digital solutions by accentuating our offerings in consulting, engineering and managed services across various business verticals.”

Prolifics was able to complete this major achievement, winning one global and two regional awards for a single solution that leverages the power of open-data architecture, cloud-native technology and microservice-based frameworks. Together, they build a unified data analytics platform that enables the accelerated delivery of scalable and highly responsive real-time data metrics. This allows Prolifics’ clients to leverage interactive data visualisations and run AI/ML workloads on Azure and AWS for rich business insights at blazing speeds.

Alongside the technical achievements, Prolifics was also recognised in the category of Top Global CIO, highlighting our strong, innovation-led leadership. Greg Hodgkinson, CTO at Prolifics, said, “Innovation is mainstream at Prolifics. We have taken numerous initiatives to nurture innovation culture in our organization. We take customers’ complex problems through our global innovation centre journey to co-create unique, innovative, and affordable solutions. The 2021 Global Award for Digital Architecture Excellence has sparked a flame that will ignite new projects to come.”

Ajay Malgaonkar, Vice President and Head of Engineering & Global Delivery, who was also recognized in the category of Top Global Chief Digital Strategist and Chief Solution Architects, was overjoyed with this achievement. Malgaonkar said, “This award is a worthy recognition of the team’s leadership in forging industry-leading digital engineering capabilities, enterprise architecture best practices and a true commitment to offer unmatched delivery experiences to our clients. A great collaborative global team of skilled engineers is at the helm of it all.”

You can review a list of all the ICMG Global Winners 2021 here.

About ICMG Global: ICMG Global has been promoting creative and responsible Digital Architecture in the corporate world by encouraging innovation and enterprise. This award program is in its 15th year and provides a platform to showcase innovation, solutions, results, success, and the logic and the process of using enterprise architecture to achieve business goals. A neutral, peer level, jury driven assessment which includes highly distinguished members like John Zachman and many others, carry out detail assessments over 300 feature points to arrive at the ratings.