MuleSoft today announced the findings of the 2020 Connectivity Benchmark Report on the state of IT and digital transformation.
The global survey of 800 CIOs and IT decision-makers (ITDMs) in organizations with at least 1,000 employees revealed that digital transformation has widely become a strategic imperative for businesses with nearly all respondents (92%) currently undertaking initiatives or planning to in the next year.
However, significant integration challenges exist for 85% of organizations – stalling digital transformation and negatively impacting revenue, speed to market and customer experiences.
Businesses are under increasing pressure to digitally transform, and for good reason: three out of four expect a decline in revenue if they fail to do so in the next year.
They’re also struggling to overcome a common obstacle: of the almost 900 different applications used by the average enterprise, only 28% of those applications are integrated – preventing a single view of the customer. As a result, more than half of businesses are unable to provide connected experiences for customers.
“CIOs are uniquely positioned to lead their organization’s digital transformation. IT leaders across all industries must be focused on creating a new operating model that accelerates the speed of delivery, increases organizational agility and delivers innovation at scale,” said Simon Parmett, CEO, MuleSoft. “With an API-led approach, CIOs can change the clock speed of their business and emerge as the steward of a composable enterprise to democratize access to existing assets and new capabilities.”
The 2020 Connectivity Benchmark Report further highlights the following for businesses as they digitally transform:
• IT must innovate faster, and with fewer resources.
Traditional IT operating models are broken and organizations are being forced to find new ways of accelerating project delivery and reusing integrations. At least half of respondents say their IT budgets will increase by less than 10% this year despite their project workloads skyrocketing by 40% (up from 32% last year). Yet 82% of businesses are now holding their IT teams accountable for delivering connected customer experiences.
• Businesses are failing to capture the full value of APIs without a company-wide strategy
Organizations are increasingly leveraging APIs as building blocks to streamline integration while supporting reuse and self-service across the enterprise. In fact, 80% of businesses currently use public or private APIs. However, very few have developed a strategic approach to enable API usage across the business.
• API reuse is directly linked to the speed of innovation, operational efficiency and revenue
By establishing API strategies that promote self-service and reuse, businesses put themselves in a much better position to innovate at speed, increase productivity and open up new revenue streams. More than half (52%) of organizations say that IT has generated the most business value by building reusable integrations that save time and money on future projects. Despite this success, only 42% of ITDMs are leveraging APIs to increase the efficiency of their application development processes.
