Gartner defines the application programming interface (API) management market as the market for software to manage, govern and secure APIs. Organizations use APIs to modernize their architectures; APIs provide access to systems, services, partners and data services. API management software enables organizations to plan, deploy, secure, operate, version control and retire APIs, regardless of their size, region or industry.
'Application integration platforms enable independently designed applications, apps and services to work together. Key capabilities of application integration technologies include: • Communication functionality that reliably moves messages/data among endpoints. • Support for fundamental web and web services standards. • Functionality that dynamically binds consumer and provider endpoints. • Message validation, mapping, transformation and enrichment. • Orchestration. • Support for multiple interaction patterns, content-based routing and typed messages.
A digital integration hub (DIH) is an architectural pattern that centralizes data from various sources to provide a scalable, and real-time layer for modern digital applications, especially beneficial for enterprises looking to transform to digitized sales processes. It aggregates data from multiple systems of record into a low-latency, high-performance data store (the data management layer) which is then accessed by sales force automation (SFA), sales enablement and other tools via APIs or events. It also provides a central layer of abstraction that decouples applications from underlying systems, making it easier to integrate and manage new data sources and applications without disrupting existing systems. DIH provides sales teams with rich and responsive access to massive data sources, limits the fees paid to API providers and helps enable 24/7 operations enhancing customer experience through self service, digital commerce and loyalty.
Gartner defines enterprise low-code application platforms (LCAPs) as platforms for accelerated development and maintenance of applications, using model-driven tools for the entire application’s technology stack, generative AI and prebuilt component catalogs. Enterprise LCAPs target software engineering teams responsible for custom application development and maintenance. Enterprise LCAP features include support for the collaborative development of all application components; runtime environments for high performance, availability and scalability of applications; application deployment and monitoring with detailed usage insights. Enterprise LCAP platforms feature governance controls and success management through self-service capabilities and APIs, developer documentation and training, and service-level agreements for platform operations. Enterprise LCAPs provide the foundation for developing a wide range of application types and application components, including complex front ends, business process automation and distributed data sources.
Gartner defines integration platform as a service (iPaaS) as a vendor-managed cloud service that enables end users to implement integrations between a variety of applications, services and data sources, both internal and external to their organization. iPaaS enables end users of the platform to integrate a variety of internal and external applications, services and data sources for at least one of the three main uses of integration technology: Data consistency: The ability to monitor for or be notified by applications, services and data sources about changes, and to propagate those changes to the appropriate applications and data destinations (for example, “synchronize customer data” or “ingest into data lake”). Multistep process: The ability to implement multistep processes between applications, services and data sources (for example, to “onboard employee” or “process insurance claim”). Composite service: The ability to create composite services exposed as APIs or events and composed from existing applications, services and data sources (for example, to create a “credit check” service or to create a “generate fraud score” service). These integration processes, data pipelines, workflows, automations and composite services are most commonly created via intuitive low-code or no-code developer environments, though some vendors provide more-complex developer tooling.
MDM is a technology-enabled business discipline in which business and IT work together to ensure the uniformity, accuracy, stewardship, governance, semantic consistency and accountability of an enterprise’s official shared master data assets. Master data has the lowest number of consistent and uniform sets of identifiers and attributes that uniquely describe the core entities of the enterprise and are used across multiple business processes.