AMPLIFY Central solves “The need for speed” with enterprise APIs and services 

As Maverick famously said in Top Gun, “I feel the need—the need for speed.” Fast forward 30 years, and organizations today feel the same way about their businesses, especially when it comes to digital goods and services. 

The rush to digital has created incredible new innovations for consumers and business customers, but also sky-high expectations that make the enterprise technology landscape more difficult than ever to navigate. Users anticipate a steady drumbeat of fresh features, on-demand services and frequent updates all the time—creating a constant barrage of pressures for the enterprise IT teams that work on them. 

Competing organizations are locked in a dogfight, jockeying for market position based on the digital experiences that they’re able to deliver—whether that’s for consumers, partners or even their own employees. Everything hinges on these new experiences, and so IT teams are tasked with the tough mission of piloting their organizations safely through it all. But from managing new mesh app and service architectures to ensuring data security and policy compliance across regions, the assignment has never been so fraught with more challenges or danger. 

How can teams deliver exceptional services at scale worldwide to meet business demands? Let’s break it down. 

Calling all APIs 

We’ve reached the next phase of digital transformation. No longer is it just about laying the foundation or putting in all the “pipes” and “rails” to make data available for external channels. Today’s digital transformation is all about how you optimize and differentiate based on the digital experiences that you can deliver. To this, enterprises are adopting Mesh app and service architectures and leveraging containerization to make it easier to build, maintain, and scale apps in any direction to meet unanticipated or dynamic business demands. 

With this shift also comes an explosion of new API transactions. In fact, during the past year, many Axway customers have gone from requesting 10 to 15 million API calls per month to requesting up to 10 billion API transactions per month. This exponential growth has brought about new challenges for enterprises, including how to control API traffic—both service-to-service (“east-to-west”) and consumer-to-service (“north-to-south”)—and data movement across multiple regions, gateways and containers. 

At Axway, we’ve been working closely with large enterprises worldwide to understand their needs beyond traditional API Management. One thing that is abundantly clear is that IT and integration teams have become the bottleneck for innovation. To bring services to scale, they need to be able to delegate some of that control outward, but while also maintaining a firm grip on everything that’s going on. That requires a bird’s-eye view to see all the services and APIs available within an organization and the ability to control them from one location. 

AMPLIFY Central: Your traffic control tower

AMPLIFY Central is a hybrid, multi-cloud environment management system with a unified catalog that’s able to see all services and APIs within an organization. It is the enterprise “air control tower” for all your API traffic, managing the metadata of your environments and providing visibility and control to APIs and services, no matter where they may be. 

Just like an airline control tower, AMPLIFY Central manages all traffic, whether it’s on the ground (on-premises) or in the sky (in the cloud). It applies the right policies to APIs in flight whether they’re a standard Boeing 737 plane, a small aircraft such as a Piper or Cessna, or Maverick’s F-14 Tomcat. Certain policies apply to all planes, some differ based on the airline or airspace, and then some are associated with individual airports (the control tower also needs to communicate with other airports). 

AMPLIFY Central manages all of this and more for complete application integration. For example, a large multinational manufacturing company is now full speed ahead in embracing the next level of digital transformation focusing on experience. To do this, they must be able to delegate to various regions around the world and enable those regions to choose the right tools for the job without losing control. They will have multiple service meshes worldwide and utilizes multiple API Gateways ranging from AWS API Gateway, Azure API Gateway and Axway API Gateways all fit for a purpose to ensure the job gets done quickly, while remaining confident that their APIs are easily discoverable to speed innovation, and that the security and control of the APIs is never compromised.  

Controlling all of this traffic and data flow—the billions of calls both east-to-west and north-to-south—allows organizations to reach those higher-level services that have a huge impact on the digital experiences they’re able to deliver. AMPLIFY Central does the heavy lifting and frees organizations to focus on the experiences that will define market leaders in today’s digital economy.