Summary

For some time now, digital transformation and digital modernization have been discussed in countless articles and references. There has been a success in these transformations, as well as many failures. At the beginning of this chapter, you were provided with background knowledge of the driving influences of businesses and how improvements in technology have driven new business practices. By understanding how the 7Ps of marketing (price, product, place, promotion, passion, people, and process) has led digital transformation and modernization into a holistic consolidation where all the parts of the organization work toward a common goal. By understanding your customers and taking advantage of new ways of doing business through digital technology, you learned that organizations can be more agile, run more efficiently, and produce products at a high level of efficiency and creativity so that consumers will react passionately about your product and do the promotion for you.

You learned that, of the many ways to modernize, APIs become the flexible glue that ties the solutions together. APIs are apparent at many levels of your architecture. Of the three major layers of APIs (UX APIs, process/interactive APIs, and system APIs), you learned that API Connect is dominant in the latter two by providing important management capabilities that follow the digital transformation's holistic practice.

In the latter half of this chapter, you were provided with more details on how API Connect supports your digital transformation. You were introduced to how API Connect can be installed on various platforms that follow your modernization efforts, whether that be on-premises, on cloud platforms using Kubernetes, or with OpenShift/Cloud Pak for Integration. By learning about all the available options, you now have choices that you can map to your strategic goals.

You are now at a point where having a deeper insight into API Connect will give you the tools to begin building, deploying, securing, and managing your digital transformation with APIs. The next chapter will provide that introduction.