In an interview with Insights Success, the Chief Strategy Officer and Chief Marketing Officer of Jitterbit, Simon Peel, shares key insights into his organization’s empowering approach towards accelerating Digital Transformations: APIs. Jitterbit achieves this acceleration using an API Integration Platform that provides companies with all the integration capabilities they need. Simon further comments about Jitterbit’s future vision and how it plans to ceaselessly revolutionize the API industry.
Following are the highlights from the interview between Simon and Insights Success:
Give us insight into your background and your role in the company.
I am the Chief Strategy Officer and the Chief Marketing Officer at Jitterbit. My role is to drive Jitterbit to become the #1 company known for speeding up Digital Transformations. We do that using a unique API Integration Platform capable of sharing valuable corporate data from any internal system via APIs quickly, 100% securely, and reliably, across the enterprise and to external partners. Prior to Jitterbit, I have successfully taken several startup companies from their early stages to successful exits. I also led the go-to-market strategy for three of IBM’s fastest-growing acquisitions including Cast Iron Systems, a cloud integration company; Worklight, a mobile app platform; and StrongLoop, which focused on Node API creation and management.
Prior to selling Cast Iron Systems to IBM, I led strategy and marketing as the CMO of Cast Iron Systems.
What are the cutting-edge products/solutions offered by Jitterbit?
Jitterbit provides the Harmony API Integration platform that enables customers to integrate multiple apps and data sources in a matter of days, and securely share information internally and externally. Jitterbit offers the only digital-native integration solution designed from the ground up to cater to the requirements of various user personas, from technical experts to the rapidly emerging group of business users who are demanding access to data via applications or by just using their voice.
The Jitterbit Harmony API platform comes with the following three products:
Design Studio – Jitterbit’s design platform allowing customers to design, test, and deploy their integration projects.
API Manager – Jitterbit’s API management solution that developers can quickly and securely expose data from existing apps as APIs, publish developer-friendly APIs and perform full API lifecycle management tasks.
Citizen Integrator – a wizard-driven interface for quickly deploying basic integrations between popular endpoints such as NetSuite, Workday, Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, Shopify, Magento, ServiceMax, etc. via simple predefined templates called “Recipes.”
Describe the experiences, achievements or lessons learnt that have shaped the journey of your company.
We’ve seen in the consumer tech world how APIs work amazingly well to make data and technology available for people to compose new and transformative apps like the Lyft App or Snapchat. The obvious next step is to get the enterprise to a similar place – where all the information trapped in legacy systems can be exposed and reused through APIs. Traditionally, a large army of developers would code many APIs for each enterprise application and database that companies rely on for their business. However, the enormous amount of time and resources that manually coding APIs from scratch would require, make this approach too slow and costly to keep up with the demands of the real-time economy.
Fortunately, much of the foundation for building these APIs has already been completed by companies that work to deliver integration to a wide range of customers. These integration providers have already done the heavy lifting of collecting and transforming the data from thousands of enterprise systems to feed into other applications. From there, by using a powerful API creation technology like ours, it’s a relatively simple task to open up that pipeline of information that feeds into other applications and expose it as a rules-based API that can be accessed by internal and external users.
What according to you could be the potential future of API solutions and how does Jitterbit envision sustaining its competitive advantage?
APIs have clearly taken over the connectivity landscape, but most APIs are proprietary and completely inconsistent from API to API, vendor to vendor and so on. The advent of Swagger and the OpenAPI standard it helping a great deal, but the standardization of API structures and definitions across the whole market may never occur. Jitterbit is on the forefront of the innovation that is solving this problem, offering automatically created OpenAPIs that are consistent, well documented and that connect back into all of the various systems they need to pull data from. We will continue to offer newer and easier ways to create and interact with these APIs, like for instance just by using your voice. Ounds like a sci-fi novel, but watch for a big announcement from us shortly. And here will be many more surprises like that to come.
Curing Cancer
ASCO, the American Society of Clinical Oncology is assembling vast amounts of searchable, real-world, clinical cancer data in a powerful database, called CancerLinQ, to enable quality and personalized cancer care for every patient. That data comes from public health sources, electronic health records stored in applications like Epic/Cerner/AllScripts/MOSAIQ, data warehouses, lab systems, practice management platforms and thousands of oncology practices across the US.
The data needs to get from all these different sources into CancerLinQ’s central database, having been safely anonymized and securely transmitted. Jitterbit has solved this problem for ASCO CancerLinQ and we now transfer millions of patient records per day with over a billion oncology records processed to date. It’s estimated that, with comprehensive information on just 3% of patients, 100% of patients can be helped in their cancer journey.
Rocket Science
Virgin Orbit offers launch services for small satellites weighing up to 300KG. It launches satellites into sun-synchronous orbit using the LauncherOne rocket, which is air-launched from a modified Boeing 747 called Cosmic Girl. To achieve this, they’re binding together Machine Learning, Augmented Reality, Human-machine collaboration, IoT, Oracle EBS (for ERP) Team-center by Siemens (for PLM), Ultipro (for Payroll), Solumina (for Manufacturing), plus an Engineering database and a Quality Management system.
Virgin Orbit estimates a tenfold increase in the effectiveness of these technologies by tying them together into a “one user, one system” approach, a 50% reduction in the time taken to achieve this, and a 500K per year saving versus the other ways they look at doing this. All of this is achieved using Jitterbit.
