Level up with a recap of Axway Summit 2021

Axway’s acclaimed annual technology conference, Axway Summit 2021, has just wrapped up its final session, once again delivering inspiring insights, actionable strategies, and innovative thinking to help your enterprise level up.

Axway Summit 2021 recap

The conference was held virtually in three different regions of the world and offered a diverse line-up of solution and technical tracks that were designed to help both business and IT leaders navigate the shifting terrain of technology and customer expectations.

Here’s a recap of the event. And if you’d like to dive deeper into any of these presentations, they are now all available on-demand.

Axway by your side — getting from here to there

As Axway celebrates 20 years, CEO Patrick Donovan kicked off Axway Summit 2021 by highlighting how our enduring infrastructure and continued investment enable your customers to level up to a whole new realm of digital possibilities.

Donovan equated leading digital transformation to a home renovation: “You might still be living inside the home, and the foundation needs to remain, but the existing infrastructure is scaffolded while the home is refreshed and added to.”

He highlighted customer successes such as Railinc, which provides rail data and messaging services to the North American freight railway industry, and Brazilian financial market infrastructure provider B3.

How do you get from here to there, he asked? “Often, you need to innovate on both the ‘here’ and the ‘there,’” Donovan explained.

“All of you are being asked to innovate, be agile, be future-thinking, ask ‘what’s coming up next.’ But it’s not just about the new app or innovative business model. For enterprises, innovation is also around your foundation systems, and we can help you lower your operational costs, or make incremental business changes, which is more of an evolution,” said Donovan. He added that by doing both, companies will get to the summit of their climb.

From silos and spaghetti to future-ready

Peter Weill, Chairman of the MIT Center for Information Systems Research (CISR), took center stage next.

Axway recently became MIT CISR’s newest patron, contributing to extending the reach of high-quality research that makes the entire business ecosystem better.

Weill presented findings from the MIT CISR’s research on enterprise replatforming, transforming tangled, siloed systems into a set of future-ready platforms.

He explained that companies are working hard to transform on two different levels at the same time. On the one hand, focusing on innovating and improving customer experience, and on the other, attempting to improve operational efficiency.

The companies studied had different levels of financial performance based on the approach they took.

Weill’s team found four different approaches to enterprise replatforming:

1. API layer
2. Partial replacement
3. Migration
4. Core replacement.

A key takeaway is that they found the API layer was the best approach, although also the most expensive:

“Enterprises following the API layer approach had the best growth and margins relative to their competitors, and also the best revenues from cross-selling, innovation, digital delivery, and monetizing data,” said Weill.

Read more about their research on the four approaches to enterprise re platforming in this white paper.

Axway’s roadmap to success: innovation is everywhere

Rahim Bhatia, Axway’s EVP of Product Management, laid out Axway’s product roadmap next and shared the stage with several customers who shared their success stories with Axway solutions.

He said Axway partners with some of the most amazing brands in the world, great businesses full of passionate people who are at an inflection point, under pressure to “level up.”

“APIs are only as valuable as how you’re able to make the consumer successful with your APIs,” said Bhatia, sharing stories of how NOV Inc. and LUXHUB leveraged their APIs to generate business.

Axway’s roadmap, Bhatia described, will allow Amplify’s future-proof platform to grow with your business.

The plan includes a centralized management plane with a comprehensive provider UX and enriched consumer UX, a modern gateway to provide a foundation for growth, and emerging capabilities for modern service patterns and new specifications such as AsyncAPI for event-based APIs and GraphQL Management.

Representatives from Dun & Bradstreet and Cencora joined Bhatia next, as he explained Axway would also continue to provide best-of-breed MFT capabilities as well as continuing to scale and extend Axway’s B2B expertise.

“We are here for you,” concluded Bhatia, “and we are focused on the key solutions.“

Women in Tech: Transformers or Disruptors?

According to the panelists in a new — and hopefully perennial — feature, Transformers or Disruptors: Women in Tech, women are often a little of both.

Hosted by Ann Lloyd, VP Customer Success and Experience at Axway, this all-women panel discussion closed out day one by dissecting the unique influences and opportunities that drive women to succeed in the tech space.

Lloyd was joined by panelists Chhavi Bhargava, Data Exchange Service Manager, Ford Motor Co., Fernanda Toscano, IT Senior Executive, HDI Insurance, and Susanne Schütz, Senior Vice President Customer & Business Intelligence, DB Schenker.

Panelists agreed that a diverse team brings more value to any company, and they shared from their experiences ways that organizations might further narrow the gender gap in the field.

Lloyd pointed out that today, women represent 29% of Axway’s workforce. They also represent 29% of management in the company, with hopefully an even larger share in the future.

“Axway is highly committed to supporting and developing women in our industry,” Ann Lloyd 

She added that Axway is affiliated with several associations such as the Professional Women’s Network in Europe, Women Reboot in Ireland (geared toward helping women who took a career break get back into the tech sector), and Wi-Filles, aimed at introducing 14-16-year-old girls to digital professions.

Read more about it at Information Week, where journalist Joao-Pierre Ruth described the panelists’ thoughts on how supporting a diverse workforce will benefit companies.

Discover Joao-Pierre Ruth’s article on the Women in Tech panel in Information Week

Diving in deep with the solution and technical tracks

Day two brought a wealth of in-depth content designed to share technical solutions to specific pain points.

Customers introduced on day one returned to share their stories with Amplify API Management, Axway B2B Integration, and Axway Managed File Transfer. These Axway experts offered sessions on the following topics:

▪ Scaling the speed and size of your APIs programs in the face of multi-everything

▪ Securely open your B2B ecosystem while maximizing resiliency

▪ MFT for everyone, everywhere

▪ From open banking to open everything

▪ What Amplify can do for the API producer

▪ Creating the API-enabled B2B ecosystem

▪ Catalogs for business — the API consumer view

▪ Empowering business with self-service and operational intelligence

Thank you

Finally, as Axway Chief Marketing Officer Paul French said, “just because the event is over doesn’t mean the experience – or the journey – ends. Company leaders and employees extended a heartfelt “thank you” to all of Axway’s customers for trusting us to accompany them on their journey.”