Meet the Most Comprehensive API Management Platform on the Market: ignite 6.0

We are pleased to announce the release of ignite 6.0!

As we observe more and more market leaders make the move to straddle both, digital and brick and mortar, it is becoming clear that the incumbents must master both realms to fend off disruption.

But the modern enterprise can’t expect IT to pull all of the weight in digital. Business and IT need to work together seamlessly to position themselves for digital/physical coexistence.

For this reason, all digital products must be given the same attention, ownership, and governance, as physical products. All signs say the key to unlocking digital transformation is through adopting a stringent API Product Management program.

By initiating enterprise-wide accessibility to a self-serviceable API Product Portfolio, the ignite 6.0 update supports this strategy now more than ever.

What the update includes:

• Expanded Plan Stage
• Expanded Runtime
• Foundation Packs
• Accelerators
• API Product Management Lifecycle Tour

Expanded Plan Stage.

Our Plan stage now boasts powerful new API Portfolio views of your business capability APIs, third-party APIs, and existing API Products. Meaning business leaders can select the building blocks they want to use for an idea, fill up a Wishlist and easily communicate directly with IT over the very resources IT will build with.

API Portfolio Browse View

API Portfolio Taxonomy View

The Importance of API Portfolio Views.

When you’re able to conduct an audit of your entire suite of assets and their performance metrics, your roadmap initiatives are practically drawn out for you. Powerful high-level views of your portfolio show you what you have, what you don’t, what you need, what you can build, and what you need for building.

But equally important are portfolio views such as the top-down Heatmap View, or the alphabetical Business Capability View, to provide your teams with visibility and discoverability. So they’ll have the resources they need, the mappings, the business metadata, attached to the very building blocks they’re building with.

Imagine, no notifications, no phones ringing with cross-departmental requests for data, spreadsheets, and business requirements. Ah… the sweet sound of sheer operability.

Expanded Runtime.

With this release ignite has also expanded its runtime space, whether customers choose to deploy to their existing runtime manager or use ignite’s own runtime option. So now you can test and deploy your API Products directly from ignite 6.0, and make changes that you can push out in real-time.

What this means.

This makes ignite 6.0 the most comprehensive API Product Management Lifecycle, throughout the detailed stages of Plan, Design, Build, and now Run. That means that you can now get the full, living end-to-end story of every digital asset you have along every stage, in production and running. That’s big.

It also means an extremely cost-efficient option for customers who want to test pilots in the sandbox before they deploy into the real world. Companies are spending so much money on Runtime, but when it comes down to it, only a handful of pilots prove their worth — with ignite’s runtime option, you’re only paying for what you want to scale.

Meanwhile, developer managers have full access to the business model as they make tweaks to the solution — so if throttling needs to be adjusted, the change will be made within the means of the business, and published directly into the sandbox and/or API manager (which could be ignite) in real-time.

Foundation Packs.

The new release comes with the addition of Foundation Packs — industry-specific API portfolios for those who need to hit the ground running to tackle heavy launch schedules.

Industry Foundation Packs give customers a jump-start to building quick wins with API Products.

A Foundation Pack contains the following pre-loaded core components, ready to use:

• API Products
• Business Capability Building Blocks
• Sample Third-Party APIs
• API Resource Methods
• Domain-Based Information Model
• Baseline Classification Taxonomy
• Business Glossary

Foundation Packs are built by digitalML using existing industry standards and years of enterprise customer experience as reference. This round provides a Pack for the Insurance, Banking, Retail, and Healthcare Industries.

How do Foundation Packs Help You Move Faster?

Every enterprise faces a common challenge in the backdrop of digital — the challenge of how do we build the hundreds of APIs we need to reach a state of operability and scale?

There are experiences to build, sure. But to quickly launch a fleet of MVPs, first you must build the layer underneath; the foundation of 400–2,000 business capability APIs mapped flatly to your domains, glossary, and information model.

These areas of your API Portfolio are the critical components your teams need to work smoothly in parallel throughout all stages of the API Management Lifecycle: Plan, Design, Build and Run.

A Quick Overview of the API Lifecycle

• Plan — Where Business and product owners get a holistic view of all your existing and in-flight APIs and services, allowing Business and IT to collaborate and manage the intake and prioritization of innovative new ideas and projects.
• Design — Here you can design and expose your portfolio of common microservice building blocks with consistent resources from your Domain-Based Information Model and Business Glossary, standardized API definitions, and system of record mapping, with change management, lineage, and impact analysis.
• Build — Auto-generate contracts (REST, SOAP, events), code, and mappings between layers and transaction, and test conditions. Developers can easily assemble repeatable, predictable and rapidly scalable web services and API products, then plug specific functionalities into the back-end as needed. This frees up IT minds to focus on business logic, implementation, user experience, back-end connections, and all the big-brain thinking that optimizes their skill sets.
• Run — API Products planned, designed, and built-in ignite are ready to be delivered to run, extending consistency, lineage and speed to production and execution. Once in run, ignite provides a window on actual KPIs and ROI, letting Business know how API Products are actually performing in the market and providing accurate investment decisions.​

API Product Management Lifecycle Tour.

ignite 6.0 now takes first-time visiting business and IT leaders through a quick Product Tour, making ideation, innovation, and planning API Products a self-serviceable process. Whoever you are, from whichever department, you will now be quite equipped to understand the high-level view of your API Product Management Lifecycle stages.

Why this matters.

A great portion of our offering comes in the form of breaking the enterprise silos and aligning IT and Business over one platform. This tour makes the platform more accessible and inviting to those on the Business side — a surefire route for better communication and roadmap strategy planning.

Accelerators.

Lastly, our update comes with several new Accelerators — which are customizable user interfaces built on Bootstrap principles to simplify processes for enterprise-wide adoption.

With the help of Accelerators, your teams can do things like build an API in less than 2 minutes. You can import, classify, and convert existing services into your portfolio, or you can propose a new API Product.

More on Accelerators

Essentially, Accelerators are customizable UX that your architects and managers can use to capture the right information from your team while maintaining ease of usability.

This great user experience across the lifecycle has shown to significantly help with enterprise rollout, so that other teams in your organization are quick to adopt the new product. In total, we have built around 30 accelerators to date, all which simplify technical processes and aggregate data for insightful dashboards.

In conclusion…
As our most significant release to date, ignite 6.0 brings a full suite of new accessibilities to the table, making the platform more self-serviceable than ever.

With ignite 6.0 we aim to bring IT and Business together over the most comprehensive API Product Management Platform on the market, amidst a backdrop where cooperation and mutual understanding between Business and IT leaders is increasingly vital as the modern enterprise strives to harness both, physical and digital realms.

If you’d like to learn more about ignite releases, please visit our release page or book a call and we’ll have a chat.