The 10 Best Performing API Solution Providers 2019

www.insightssuccess.com January 2019

Vol 01 Issue 01

The

10 API Best Performing

Solution Providers, 2019

Editor’s Pick The Impressive Impact of Organic Networking

Editor’s Choice The Universality of IoT Technology

Romi Stein Co-founder & CEO

Leading the Legacy API Integration Revolution

Omnichannel Agent and Customer Engagement Solutions Simplify and personalize the customer experience, empower agents and achieve business success with one workspace for all channel interactions, application integrations, and CX reporting.

Unlashing Seamless Possibilities with API

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W

ith evolving times, preferences of consumers like us are changing rapidly. A lazy person like me nowadays doesn’t even bother to get up from the bed and change the song that is being played in my music system, instead I prefer to say “Ok Google: Play Girls like you” and like an obedient person my Google smart home speaker plays the song for me.

In the last year alone Google sold over six million of its smart home speakers. The trend doesn’t stop here; people are also using virtual assistants via smartphones, Amazon Dash button for their daily chores.

These are few new trends that were non-existent even few years ago. However, these trends highlight the need for better integration. It also has to support new use cases that hasn’t been used before. Soon the integration will be joined by robots, micro-services, and DevOps that will eventually make life simpler for geeks (developers) and customers like me.

So, below are trends that could change the world of API in coming years; Ah! The good old and trusty chatbot. 2016 & 2017 was all about chatbots, and I personally don’t like them due to their inconsistency. However, in the real world scenario, chatbots will continue to grow even in 2018.

We have already seen nicely implemented chatbots especially when it comes to food and beverages industry. We can also assume that with each passing days, more companies will implement chatbots in a more sophisticated manner that can help us to a great extent.

Few days ago, I bought a simple bean bag and like a classic forgetful person I forgot to order beans for my bag. So, while on the go I tried to order beans via my smartphone, but failed to do so. After few attempts I

gave up and waited to reach my place to order from my computer. However, to be honest if it was not the discount that the eCommerce site was providing, I would have bought the beans from any other site.

So, putting aside bedside stories, connecting various apps are no longer a process of reducing manual effort and getting the data. So, in the coming future, the retail industry will witness seamless and real-time data synchronization between systems of record and various POS which will ensure a buying experience like never before.

In order to shed light upon those advocating this disruption, Insights Success brings to you, “The 10 Best Performing API Solution Providers, 2019.” Featuring on our cover is OpenLegacy, which is a Hybrid Integration and Management platform that creates APIs to leverage core (legacy) systems & quickly deliver innovative digital transformation projects. The company has experienced tremendous growth in the last year, both in terms of the organization itself and with regards to customer engagements and satisfaction. The company believes that executives should rethink their expectations for what’s possible: it no longer should take months or years to deliver a much-needed innovation to their market.

The other transformational companies which have made the list are, CognitiveClouds, which collaborates with startups and enterprises to design, develop, and deliver products that define the future; Cyclr, which is an embedded integration platform (embedded IPaaS) for SaaS applications; Jitterbit, which helps businesses accelerate their Digital Transformation and make faster, more effective decisions by enabling them to unify and exploit data from all sources, Loop AI Labs, which is a global leader in unsupervised Cognitive Computing based solutions for Digital Transformation and Cognitive Robotic Process Automation; and NEVERDIE Studios, which produces Worlds, Games, Virtual Products, Live Action Movies and Hit Records.

Also, make sure to flip through our articles, written by our in-house editorial team as well as the CXO standpoints of notable industry personalities to have a brief taste of the sector.

Bon appetite!

Abhishaj Sajeev

CONTENTS Leading the Hybrid Integration Revolution

08 Cover Story

16

26

46

Tech Outlook

CXO Standpoint

Maestro’s Insights

The Evolutionof Testing: Unmatched Acceleration with Fifth Generation Automation

Leverage Existing SAP Solutions with Cloud Procurement

Looking for or Using an EDI Tool?A Few Things you ought to Know

CognitiveClouds

Articles

Started Small, Living Big

20 22 Editor’s Choice

Cyclr

The Universality of IoT Technology

Delivering Rapid Integrations for S aaS Applications

28 30 Editor’s Pick

Jitterbit

The Impressive Impact of Organic Networking

Taking the API Industry

by Storm

34 40 Energy Effcient Technology

Loop AI Labs

Green Cloud Computing Saving Energy through Technology

Creating a New Era of Cognitive Technology

36 NEVERDIE Connecting Games and Virtual Worlds via the blockchain

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Editor-in-Chief Managing Editor Executive Editor Assistant Editors Contributing Editors Visualiser Art & Design Director Associate Designer Co-designer

Pooja M. Bansal Anish Miller Bhushan Kadam Jenny Fernandes Hitesh Dhamani Abhishaj Sajeev Shubham Khampariya David King Amol Kamble Shubham Mahadik Aparna Vanzul

Art & Picture Editors Paul Belin Jayant Khanna Senior Sales Manager Passi D. Business Development Manager George Henry Marketing Manager John Matthew Business Development Executives Steve, Joe, Alan Sales Executives David, Kevin, Mark, Gemson Technical Head Jacob Smile Technical Specialists Amar, Pratiksha Digital Marketing Manager Marry D’Souza Online Marketing Strategists Alina Sege, Shubham, Vaibhav K SME-SMO Executives Prashant Chevale, Uma Dhenge, Gemson, Irfan Research Analyst Patrik James Circulation Managers Robert, Tanaji Database Management Stella Andrew Technology Consultant David Stokes sales@insightssuccess.com

January, 2019 Corporate Ofces: Insights Success Media Tech LLC 555 Metro Place North, Suite 100, Dublin, OH 43017, United States Phone - (614)-602-1754 Email: info@insightssuccess.com For Subscription: www.insightssuccess.com

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The

Best Performing

10API Solution Providers, 2019

— Romi Stein

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“

OpenLegacy takes back-end systems to the future.

Co-founder & CEO

OpenLegacy

Cover Story

Leading the Hybrid Integration Revolution

“

“

We dramatically improve the speed and success of Digital Transformation Projects.

I

n addition to being named one of the Top 10 Best Performing API Solution Providers, disruptive newcomer OpenLegacy has recently been making headlines around the world with an impressive $30 milliondollar funding round. As analyst Tom Smith at DZONE says, “OpenLegacy has earned their stripes by enabling financial services and insurance companies with significant legacy infrastructure to leverage existing systems and avoid or mitigate the risk of costly migration and modernization projects.” And that’s just the beginning of the story.

OpenLegacy is extremely potent and pertinent in scenarios where complex legacy systems are involved. The company improves the speed and success of digital transformation

projects by enabling enterprises, even extremely complex ones, to become truly digital. The organization’s API integration and management platform automates and standardizes the process of creating digital services using microservices-based APIs. An organization can move to a fast, agile and robust microservices architecture at a fraction of the time and cost it would take with other solutions – and there is no need to change the backend systems.

Products Built on a Code-first Approach The OpenLegacy platform is the first truly post-SOA integration product and is built on a code-first approach providing flexibility and speed that were not previously possible. A digital service can be created from a back-end or legacy system within days, enriched with additional functionality and deployed to production using the same DevOps process used when deploying code.

OpenLegacy recently announced the latest version of its software, thus, smoothing the path for enterprises to speed integration of the latest in fintech, insurtech, and other digital, customer and process-focused technologies.

One prime highlight of the latest version is the support for OpenShift, which is an enterprise cloud platform based on Kubernetes, commonly used by financial institutions. Now, OpenLegacy users can deploy APIs seamlessly into the OpenShift/Kubernetics environment.

Helping Clients Get to Market First

A Proven Experience One of the trailblazers contributing to the growth of OpenLegacy is Romi Stein, the Co-founder and CEO. Being a CEO, he provides strategic direction and oversees the company’s day-to-day execution. He has accumulated a wealth of experience in all aspects of information technology and business leadership.

Previously, he worked in a leadership position at IBM’s global headquarters, doing business development and market analysis when he met Roi Mor, OpenLegacy’s other Co-founder and CTO, who was working on a solution to a problem Romi was very familiar with – the unacceptable complexity of integrating with legacy systems. He first became an early investor and later took on the role of CEO in order to fulfill that mission of simplifying, demystifying and standardizing integration.

Changing the Expectations of the Market OpenLegacy has experienced tremendous growth in the last year, both in terms of the organization itself and with regards to customer engagements and satisfaction. The company believes that executives should rethink their expectations for what’s possible: it no longer should take months or years to deliver a much-needed innovation to their market. After all, in that same period of time, a startup could incorporate, launch a product and reach hundreds of millions of users to disrupt an entire market.

Being Customer-centric

Like any other start-up company, OpenLegacy’s journey By inventing an incredibly fast and reliable way to was unexpected and unique. Since the technology was connect its customers’ created even before the company, the company started core back-end systems with mobile, cloud and web solutions in minutes or days, the software can help OpenLegacy is a microservices-based legacy-laden enterprise clients in numerous hybrid integration platform delivering ways: as an alternative to risky and costly digital services from legacy, approaches to legacy modernization or core and on-premise applications. migration; improving time-to-market for digital innovations; accelerating omnichannel initiatives and, fintech or insurtech with a product and customers already in place. This was collaborations; addressing the aftermath of big league perhaps the defining factor in making OpenLegacy the mergers and acquisitions; complying with industry or customer-centric company that it is today. government-driven regulations, and much more.

Coming from a background of large IT projects and well-

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“OpenLegacy challenges customers to answer a very simple question: if you didn’t take 18 months to build an API infrastructure or 6 months on every API, what else could your company accomplish instead?” says Romi Stein, OpenLegacy CEO

known enterprise software vendors, OpenLegacy’s founders and early employees understand the importance of not only delivering for customers, but also making sure that each customer delivers on its goals. Today, its API Integration platform serves some of the largest organizations in the world, including many of the Global 1000 banks and insurance companies.

Addressing the Industry Scenario Public APIs have been popular for many years. What’s new, however, is the emergence of internal APIs that allow an organization to integrate in such a way that every interaction, every conversation, and every touchpoint with a customer will bring to bear the entire scope of the organization’s capabilities, know-how and competency across all of its lines-of-business. Internal synergies enabled by APIs and made agile by microservices will give a new meaning to the concept of a truly digital enterprise.

Worldwide Strategic & Financial Investors OpenLegacy will continue to strengthen its market position with their recent 30 million dollar funding round from global investors who see value in both funding and promoting the technology. Recent round participants include: Silverhorn Investment Advisors (lead investor); CommerzVentures, the VC unit of Commerzbank; C. Entrepreneurs, the VC created by BNP Paribas Cardif with Cathay Innovation; Leumi Partners; O.G. Tech Ventures - Eyal Ofer’s VC arm; Prytek-GFS Group; and RDC, a major investor from the seed stage, which is a joint venture between Elron and Rafael. “We have a clear perspective on OpenLegacy’s advantages,” said Patrick Meisberger, CommerzVentures’ Managing Director. “We understand the size of the potential market because we can see first-hand the challenges of adopting new technologies in legacy environments. OpenLegacy helps with a variety of use cases, from creating APIs quickly

for any backend system all the way to a full, phased cloud migration,” he adds.

Reflection of OpenLegacy Customer Satisfaction “The ‘wow moment’ for us when working with OpenLegacy came when we exposed a Swagger API with account data from our mainframe. It only took us a few hours with OpenLegacy — it would have taken weeks otherwise.”— Chief Information Officer Premier European Bank “OpenLegacy let us connect our iSeries applications to our insurance agent portal without changing our COBOL applications, which would have been a huge, expensive headache. We couldn’t believe OpenLegacy was able to conform to all of our security, performance, and design constraints — and do so within days.”

— Insurance Services / IT Director “I was impressed with how fast we got everything deployed. In less than a month, Fern was able to accomplish its objectives through a modern REST API.” – Jeff Mason, Director of Customer Technology Innovation, Fern “Our new customer onboarding process will be three times faster and support customer self-service. We still use our SAP CRM backend, augmented with new API technology.” – Chief Information Officer, Investment Advisory Firm “Having the new OpenLegacy web service up and running within five days, after spending six months developing it with a competitor, was simply unbelievable.

The fact that it’s also much faster, and the product is much less expensive, sealed the deal for us.”

– Insurance Company / CIO “OpenLegacy helps us set the mainframe free, finally.

Instead of being a prohibitive factor for new projects, it’s

“

OpenLegacy enables

enterprises, no matter how

“

complex, to go truly digital.

now the enabler — with OpenLegacy generated APIs that connect to any other system in our environment.” —Leading North America Bank “Within two days, OpenLegacy created APIs for standard CBS transactions, including payments and other financial products, compared to the previous 5-7 weeks using the prior API orchestration product and existing IT architecture.” – Bank Executive “We needed to be leaner and meaner. We could no longer wait to write a program on the mainframe, then wrap it and publish as a web service.” – Panama Bank Executive “I was blown away by how fast and easy it was to develop our new AS/400 tablet app with OpenLegacy. We didn’t need to learn how to code for tablets and we didn’t need to change anything in the AS/400. We get all the benefits of the tablet, with the security and reliability of the AS/400.” – Tire Company, CIO To know more, visit: www.openlegacy.com

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The

Best Performing

10API Solution Providers, 2019

Company Name

Management

Brief

Cognitive Clouds cognitiveclouds.com

Prasanna Gopinath Co-founder & CEO

Cognitive Clouds collaborates with startups and enterprises to design, develop, and deliver products that define the future.

Cyclr Systems Limited cyclr.com

Fraser Davidson Co-founder & CEO

Cyclr is an embedded integration platform (embedded IPaaS) for SaaS applications.

digitalML digitalml.com

Jeremy Sindall CEO

digitalML holds a unique perch in the enterprise software space, selling a disruptive API Product Management portfolio to the Fortune 200.

Jitterbit jitterbit.com

Simon Peel Chief Strategy Officer & Chief Marketing Officer

Jitterbit helps businesses accelerate their Digital Transformation and make faster, more effective decisions by enabling them to unify and exploit data from all sources.

Loop AI Labs loop.ai

Gianmauro Calafiore CEO Dr. Patrick Ehlen Chief Scientist and CTO

Loop AI Labs is a global leader in unsupervised Cognitive Computing based solutions for Digital Transformation and Cognitive Robotic Process Automation.

NEVERDIE Studios neverdie.com

Michael Kirkham Lead Developer

NEVERDIE produces Worlds, Games, Virtual Products, Live Action Movies and Hit Records.

OnSched onsched.com

Connor Paddon CEO

OnSched helps lead aggregators, marketplaces and PPC directories triple the value of their leads by connecting buyers and sellers through our enterprise online booking platform.

OpenLegacy openlegacy.com

Romi Stein Co-founder & CEO

OpenLegacy is a Hybrid Integration and Management platform that creates APIs to leverage core (legacy) systems & quickly deliver innovative digital transformation projects.

Polybius polybius.io

Ivan Turygin Co-founder

Polybius is a straightforward user-friendly personal finance manager for everyone.

Trexle trexle.com

Hossam Hossny President

Trexle is a powerful platform that integrate +100 payment gateways with a dozen of e-commerce platforms.

Tech Outlook

The

Evolution of

Testing: Unmatched Acceleration with Fifth Generation Automation

Shoeb Javed CTO Worksoft

T

he Early Years of Packaged Applications

From the inception of packaged applications, companies of all sizes have taken advantage of the economies of building, maintaining, changing and deploying functionality through third party software providers. Why build a general ledger or payroll/human resources system when you can license it instead? Why not leverage out of the box functionality offered by third party software and rely on the vendor to

16

offer support and maintenance and stay current on regulatory, industry and process best practices.

The ďŹ rst generation of mainframe software transformed quickly as the technology evolved, introducing client-server as the better, more cost-effective deployment platform. The applications themselves were still being developed and deployed in functional silos – their interaction with other critical functions of the business an after-thought. Although less than ideal, interfaces were developed to transport data January 2019|

from one system to the next – leading to the introduction of middle-ware as an economical means of “connecting” the silos.

At that time, SAP emerged as the leader in delivering comprehensive, end-to-end business solutions on the most advanced platforms. They quickly captured the market and cross-industry adoption continued to deliver best in class results to their customers. PeopleSoft was also introduced to the market during this era, initially focusing on the payroll/human resources market. They ultimately started developing and delivering ERP and CRM systems as well.

Change continued to accelerate as web-based systems were introduced which impacted the economic and technological dynamics of “user requirements,” development, deployment, and costs.

Throughout this evolution, industries, companies and individuals not only developed an incredible reliance on the performance of their “systems,” but forward thinking organizations saw this as a quick path to competitive advantage.

The Need for Speed The problem then as now – how do you accelerate the value of the technology investment to the business? The technology was purchased, licensed, and implemented to achieve a specific set of business benefits. When it comes to these large enterprise application investments, companies conduct in-depth evaluations and build business cases to map out exactly what results they expect to realize. This typically involves a look at what financial and human capital investments – time and money – will be needed to achieve success with a product as well as the financial, efficiency, and competitive gains that come with the ongoing use of the software.

On one side of the equation, development methods have evolved to meet this need for speed. Waterfall methodologies are being replaced with Agile. DevOps has become the new buzz-word. But there’s something else to consider – the business side of things. There is an everincreasing reliance on packaged applications to execute and deliver critical business outcomes. It’s important that applications are developed and deployed quickly and changes can be made regularly, but how do you ensure that business processes are running flawlessly?

Surprisingly, many companies are managing their enterprise application processes manually. This means hours of whiteJanuary 2019|

board meetings spent trying to understand existing business processes. Weeks during every project spent writing test scripts that break when something changes. Delays in delivery because manual testing can’t keep pace with business change. The implementation and ongoing management of enterprise applications is complex, and a crucial component is making sure that end-to-end processes work—every time, every day. Manual or first generation testing means system downtime, errors in production, wasted time and energy and companies left open to technology risk.

The bigger picture is that those approaches are fundamentally standing in the way of achieving the results companies set out to achieve with packaged apps. How can you make the financial, productivity, and competitive gains

About the Author Shoeb Javed, chief technology ofcer, Worksoft, is responsible for the technology strategy, software development, quality assurance and customer support for all Worksoft solutions. As CTO, Shoeb also works with quality assurance and business leaders of some of the largest global Fortune 1000 corporations to help automate testing of complex packaged enterprise applications to speed up project timelines and improve operational efciencies.

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that you were counting on if your processes aren’t performing flawlessly?

The Evolution of Testing Thankfully, the answer is today’s fifth generation test automation that is enabling business users and organizations to adopt, accept, and utilize new applications faster. When processes across enterprise applications are executed seamlessly and as designed, companies can harness the potential of their enterprise applications to achieve strategic goals like entering new markets, increasing revenue, and maintaining a competitive advantage.

Worksoft, the pre-eminent fifth generation automation platform, delivers unmatched speed in automating the identification of current business processes and automatically creating tests to ensure that each business-critical process works as required. An independent study of Worksoft customers by industry analyst IDC identified many unique benefits of Worksoft’s automation platform, but chief among them was accelerating delivery of these applications by an average of nearly

two months. Consider how much more you could accomplish if you could cut weeks and months from every project.

Leaders across the globe have adopted Worksoft as their weapon of choice to improve their financial and operational positions in their respective industries.

Lead the Way First to market with autonomous cars?

Moving your business model from DVDs to online subscription services?

Evolving from an online bookstore to the world’s largest internet retailer?

These companies didn’t simply try to keep up. They were determined to lead.

Today’s digital economy brings massive opportunity to companies looking to disrupt the market. There has been a fundamental change to the business landscape and companies who are competitive innovators will win.

About the Company: Worksoft provides the world's leading automation platform for enterprise applications. Companies worldwide rely on Worksoft’s automated business process discovery, documentation, compliance, testing, risk analysis, and RPA to support critical packaged applications, including SAP, Salesforce, Oracle, Workday, SuccessFactors, ServiceNow and more.

Our fifth-generation automation platform helps enterprises accelerate innovation and change, lower technology risk, and increase efficiency. Our ecosystem includes partnerships with Accenture, IBM, Cognizant, SAP and our Global 5000 customers include 3M, Intel, Microsoft, Siemens and more.

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January 2019|

The

Best Performing

10API Solution Providers, 2019

CognitiveClouds Started Small, Living Big

I

n an interview with Insights Success, the CEO and Founder of CognitiveClouds, Prasanna Gopinath, shares his insights about being himself and pushing the envelope. Accustoming to a job loving culture and setting clients achievement as its goal, his company CognitiveClouds have tasted fruitful success over the years.

CognitiveClouds offers API solutions at a global scale. Prasanna has also mentioned about a Cognitive vision and approach towards the business.

Below are highlights from the interview conducted between Prasanna Gopinath and Insights Success: Give a brief overview of the CognitiveClouds, its uniqueness, and its vision.

At CognitiveClouds, we partner with clients across industries, ranging from Oil to agriculture, to help them connect the dots between various emerging technologies to deliver compelling connected experiences. The success of our clients and the products we build for them is the only metric we use to judge ourselves. Also, my whole team happens to love big ideas. So we strive to work with founders and business leaders who have ambitions of defining

new industries and creating new markets. We have a lot of exciting projects lined up shortly that could push the envelope.

What are the cutting-edge products/solutions offered by CognitiveClouds?

We like to work with modern technologies like Ruby on Rails (RoR), Android, iOS, Golang (Go), Scala and Node.js, as we’ve come to trust our expertise over the last seven years in building robust mobile and responsive web products using these tools. Lately, we’ve been recruiting experts in the fields of Blockchain, Data Science and Data Analytics to develop our expertise in these areas. Our clients were thrilled with the last couple of projects we’ve worked on in the field. I’m very proud of the team we’ve put together.

Give a detailed description of the featured personnel’s influence over the company and the API solutions industry.

Six years ago, when I came to India, fresh off my experience with Cisco and Sourcebits, I had a dream of building a company that could build Enterprise grade products, while retaining the drive of a startup. This ‘Evergreen Software Product Studio’ my team and I have built, has far exceeded what I

20

envisioned. I believe the success of my company lies in its culture, the culture I’ve been able to shape in each member of our team. And it proved easy because we managed to attract young talent across the country who shared the same love for coding and respect for discipline, I did. So my influence translates in keeping that culture and love for their job alive. Our vast portfolio and our Clutch rankings are a testimony to my team’s and my influence over the API solution’s industry.

Describe the experiences, achievements or lessons learned that have shaped the journey of your company.

Early on in my journey, I learned the importance of starting small. Initially, I was as restless as most startup founders are to work on projects that were diverse, to taste success soon and act like I was working out of an enterprise as I was used to doing until then. But, all of us are forced to start small, few learn to enjoy it. I learned to enjoy working on a project involving a very basic webpage with the same joy I take in spearheading a blockchain project.

The rankings, the Fortune 500 clients we’ve worked with along the way and the happy clients are merely incidental.

The lessons we learn that truly make a

January 2019|

difference to the company aren’t always monumental.

What are the challenges faced while providing API solutions and how is CognitiveClouds serving to tackle them?

The arrival of the Internet of Things or IoT has made APIs indispensable for facilitating communication between objects. And the lower entry barriers for their use have made it popular across small and medium-sized businesses. Business models based on the data exchange that APIs allow are becoming extremely common today.

Even with all the evidence supporting the great importance of APIs in the digital economy, there are still a few challenges we’ve yet to overcome. The APIs available in the market all have different standards regarding reliability, stability, and quality. A few may turn into gateways for hackers.

Not all are equally safe. The transition to a much more customer-centric economy is forcing them to integrate the latest innovations in contextual or artificial intelligence to manage cognitive and prescriptive workflows since most APIs are based on aggregating simple commands. Some APIs as a service like SendGrid, Twilio and Stripe are incorporated into almost every product we build.

What according to you could be the potential future of API solutions and how does CognitiveClouds envision sustaining its competency?

As we look at the future of technology, we see an API that is progressively more agile in the coming years. While agility is already a major factor of APIs, we haven’t come close to reaching its potential yet. Micro

January 2019|

Whether you’re racing towards a hard deadline, building the rst product of its kind or leapfrogging a competitor, we work with you to understand what will make our partnership successful.

Prasanna Gopinath CEO & Founder

services architecture will also be a major trend. It allows developers more freedom to use API integration for API-related innovation, much like with agility. Open APIs makes it far easier for us to better existing applications.

You can move toward an automated, proactive world by leveraging the assorted open APIs available. Newlydeveloped methods of IT management, such as ChatOps and DevOps, all rely on APIs to facilitate communication between assorted software integrations.

Open APIs makes it easier to manage these setups even though the complexity of such networks is enormous. However, this growing network of dependency will mean that your site and its uptime and performance become vulnerable to issues faced by other vendors. That’s where we come in. Keeping up with the changes and knowing how to

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maximize the benefits can be tricky to understand. Streamlining your API integration is one of the easiest, quickest and most effective ways to ensure you stay on top of all the latest trends and maximize its value.

Testimonials from CognitiveClouds Clients “They’re eager to make sure that what they’re building is exactly what we need.”

All apps demonstrate excellent UI/UX and have received good feedback. The team assigned a development lead who communicated well through weekly check-ins. CognitiveClouds is open to feedback and suggestions, making any changes quickly.

EVP, Utilitworx

Editor’s Choice

The Universality of IoT Technology T

“

he gratifying tool for companies to lead ahead IoT Technology” The Internet of things (IoT) is a revolutionary change for many sectors like manufacturing, agriculture, retail, electronic, energy and healthcare which are progressing towards the IoT phenomenon to connect digitally. It has placed an opportunity to build unusual results which increases a company’s compatibility. Enterprises seeking development are focusing on the use of real-time data management and IoT analysis. Many of the companies are adopting this technology to heighten their power of consumption. Companies are mainly concentrating on IoT application from “sensing” instead of “doing” to grow its competitive advantages. This element empowers organizations by allowing them to take the IoT advantage and adopt a more ‘innovative connected approach’.

Infrastructure Management – Optimization of Technology New applications are now enhancing their level of consumption. Likewise, manufacturing sector is also

22

January 2019|

getting engrossed and achieving excellence through IoT Techniques. Applications are liable for monitoring and controlling operations for urban and rural manufactures like bridges, farms, and railway tracks. It is the key features of the applications were IoT infrastructure is also used for monitoring the construction safety and risk management system and operations. This major feature represents the mechanism of IoT application which works under infrastructure management. Benefits of IoT Technology are cost reducing, time reducing, better in quality, and increase productivity. It helps to make fast decisions and save money with real-time analysis. IoT devices help to give prominent results by monitoring and controlling operations used in all infrastructure related area.

Manufacturing Techniques are Growing with IoT Technology In the manufacturing sector, networking and controlling have been used with IoT devices. It provides information about data and operation stability. Network status and the information is collected in the system by tracking IoT device. Manufacturing control process deliver information about industry application and smart manufacturing details receiving form IoT device. IoT intelligent system enables sharing information about product demands, service management, supply chain networks, sensors and control systems together. Small industries can also be integrated with IoT technology that enables real-time optimization, measurements, production compatibility and safety management.

However, intelligent systems are determined as the significant technique that implies user experience and system security which ultimately saves costs.

which land is fertile or which one is dry and predict future fields.

IoT Technology Helps to Optimize Energy Consumption Integrated Sensing and Control system helps to optimize energy consumption. IoT devices are integrated with energy consumption systems in order to maintain balance between power generation and energy usage. IoT devices offer the opportunity to remotely gather information. It enables advance functions like remote controlling and changing light conditions. IoT Technology work for home-based energy system which provide power related information, energy consumption and energy usage at homes. IoT devices set goals to improve efficiency, reliability and sustainability of the energy system.

Monitoring Environment through IoT Technology Environment monitoring application has been involved with sensors to assist information about environment changes by identifying water quantity, atmosphere, air pressure etc. It also has focus on monitoring movements of wildlife and their habitats. Devices connected to the internet also provide statistics about earthquake or tsunami - early warning systems, and also used as an emergency system. IoT device application is used to collect geographic information and majorly instructive information. This device also uses standardized approach to bring wireless sensing technique and gather finest information.

IoT Technology Helps to Sustain Building and Home Automation

IoT Technology brings Innovative Farming Methods The Agriculture sector is one of the industry to implement IoT technology for stability and better performance. IoT technology has become a significant method of farming. It also offers durability and functionality to the whole process. The combination of wireless sensors with agricultural apps and cloud platforms benefits in gathering definite information relating to environmental conditions like, rainfall, temperature, humidity, wind speed etc. Farmers are getting competent results out of it, and are able to find real-time information easily. Linked with farmland, it improves and automates farming techniques like weather information, taking decision on quality and quantity, and minimizes risk and waste. With IoT Tech farmers can find out detailed information of farm and similarly know January 2019|

With certainty, IoT devices are used to monitor and control the mechanical, electrical and electronic systems.

IoT devices are used in various types of home automation and building automation systems. Control and sensory applications offer unified information. The integration of the internet with building creates an energy management system which will allow prominent energy efficiency.

There have been many ways for IoT technology to expand compatibility in the digital world, and it will be implemented in each sector to work as an important tool, to enhance its affinity. After all, the IoT network makes technology more unified and satisfying, with its tools and applications and IoT will be a step ahead towards numerous opportunities.

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CXO Standpoint

Leverage Existing

SAP Solutions

with Cloud Procurement

C

ompanies that have already invested in SAP find that they can achieve even better results from their existing investment with cloud technology and eProcurement. After the initial investment, companies find certain roadblocks preventing mass user adoption and diminishing cost savings. Issues such as inability to stay connected, lack of insight into data, and complex and fragmented business rules stop businesses from using the full power of SAP. As cloud application technologies advance, companies gain the benefits of rapid deployment cycles, increased self-service tools, and faster performance.

Vroozi delivers on the promise and power of eProcurement in the Cloud with seamless integration into SAP. SAP users looking to the cloud generally face a few questions, including: · How can I benefit from using cloud procurement? · Will my transition to the cloud be cost-effective? · How will my business processes be affected by cloud technology?

To understand the benefits of cloud technology to existing SAP users, let’s evaluate three procurement strategies that highlight the power of cloud procurement.

Value Realization Return on Investment (ROI) is a central factor in any

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procurement strategy. Buyers and trading partners of cloud procurement solutions need to feel confident that solutions will lead to cost savings and higher productivity and efficiency. Users quickly see returns by focusing on user adoption, compliance, and spend management. Spend Management allows companies to visualize purchasing spending patterns and usage and drives employees to leverage preferred pricing with contract suppliers. To increase user adoption and compliance, the cloud empowers a mobile workforce with the right resources and experience so everyone stays connected and available so that business is not disrupted. As user adoption and compliance frameworks increase with cloud-based systems, organizations gain immediate cost savings in procurement by decreasing transaction costs and preventing spend leakage with your supply chain.

Efficiencies Process efficiency is key for a successful, healthy business.

Cloud technology enables better processes by keeping everyone connected through a mobile experience and automating transaction tasks through the use of machine learning and pattern matching. With a centralized, unified system, cloud automation can yield immediate benefits in requisition to invoice and payment business processes and reduced errors and issues leading to higher productivity and decreased processing costs. Further, by allowing employees

January 2019|

to interact with cloud procurement via smart Phones and tablets, business can continue to move with efficiency and speed.

IT Cost Savings Perhaps no determinant is more important in realizing the benefits of cloud technologies versus traditional on premise software is in IT Cost Savings. Systems and applications which required large physical infrastructure and monetary investments can now provide inexpensive and scalable solutions through the Cloud and cloud infrastructure providers. A procurement solution that integrates with SAP is easier to access, less expensive, and takes a fraction of the implementation time companies once faced with traditional software solutions.

Cloud technology relieves the user of hidden costs such as hardware, consultants, infrastructure, maintenance, and costly upgrade cycles, providing lower risk and lower total cost of ownership.

Conclusion The cloud offers little upfront expense, automatic upgrades, and pre-integrated best practices which allow organizations to focus on business growth and improved operating margins. Vroozi’s eProcurement solution that takes SAP solutions to the cloud empower users with better returns, better processes and higher savings, so their overall SAP investment’s ROI is accelerated.

According to IDC, spending on Cloud computing is growing at 4.5 times the rate of IT spending since 2009 and is expected to continue growing at more than 6 times the rate of IT spending from 2015 through 2020. (via Forbes) This massive growth is easily understood when businesses understand the power and value of cloud solutions. With the Vroozi Platform, companies can take advantage of robust eProcurement technology delivered in the Cloud and integrated seamlessly with SAP.

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Brad Hill Director of Global Sales & Marketing Vroozi Brad Hill, Director of Global Sales & Marketing of Vroozi is a passionate leader and is responsible for expanding the Vroozi Product Suite, Brand Adoption, Partnership Network & ensuring our customers receive an unparalleled experience with Vroozi. Brad spent the last 20 years building Enterprise Sales and Product strategies with leading IT Services organizations. His entrepreneurial strategies have served a vast number of Fortune 500 industries and verticals. He is also an aspiring mechanic and frustrated golfer, two good reminders to keep his day job.

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The

Best Performing

10API

Cyclr:

Solution Providers, 2019

Delivering Rapid Integrations for SaaS Applications

I

n today’s mobile-first, cloud first world, APIs are opening the doors for innovative business scenarios across industry verticals. APIs make the exchange of information easy by paving the way for applications to communicate and move information between programs. APIs help successful integration and interoperability between various SaaS applications. Cyclr is one such, constantly up-to-date, integration solution provider for SaaS companies.

Cyclr’s low-code developer platform allows SaaS companies to seamlessly create, manage and deliver more rapid integrations directly from within their SaaS app.

In an interview with Insights Success, Fraser Davidson, the CEO and Co-founder of Cyclr, shares the journey of Cyclr in becoming an integral contributor to the SaaS industry.

Below are highlights from the interview conducted between Fraser Davidson and Insights Success: Give a brief overview of Cyclr, its uniqueness and its vision.

Cyclr is a SaaS Integration Toolkit for SaaS companies. We want to empower

our clients with the tools and capabilities to deliver more native integrations, more rapidly and more efficiently - all with low-code. Our vision is that companies will be built on top of Cyclr and that Cyclr will become part of an enterprise’s core infrastructure.

companies so that they can focus on their core customer solution and the customer experience. My view is that a successful integration revolves around customer experience, and that the role of Cyclr is to be the ‘invisible’ partner that strengthens the arm of Cyclr’s SaaS clients.

What are the cutting-edge products/solutions offered by Cyclr?

Describe the experiences, achievements or lessons learnt that have shaped the journey of your company.

With Cyclr you can deliver ‘simple’ or ‘complex’ integrations with ease, all directly from within your own solution.

Cyclr is an agile, easy to use, environment that can expand integration responsibility out of the development team and into product and commercial teams. Everything can be built with low-code but is extremely customizable for those with the desire to craft a bit further.

Give a detailed description of your influence over the company and the API solutions industry.

As CEO of the company my role is to lead strategy, HR, fundraising and our commercial efforts. My vision for Cyclr is to make it the ‘glue’ of the SaaS industry. My task is to enable Cyclr to provide the integration utilities, pipework and toolkit for SaaS

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In the early days we experimented with a direct end-user version of Cyclr and, although technically very feasible, we determined that the paramount solution was to enable SaaS companies to provide integrations themselves rather than for us to target their end-users.

What are the challenges faced while providing API solutions and how is Cyclr serving to tackle them?

The principal challenge is that every client’s integration requirements are subtly different. We need to provide a toolkit that works in all scenarios and that starts from the premise of lowcode (with adaptability). Judging how to deliver ‘complex’ in a ‘simple’ way is an art and we are learning with each day that passes.

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What according to you could be the potential future of API solutions and how does Cyclr envision sustaining its competency?

I believe that the future of API solutions, unsurprisingly, is in empowering the owners of the APIs to resolve their users’ integration requirements directly. There is a big difference between giving your client your ‘API plug’ and saying ‘off you go and you plug it in’ versus offering the capability for them to achieve their desired outcome directly from within your own application platform.

Testimonials from Clients “Cyclr is our go-to high-end tool integration platform. Powerful, intuitive and Flexible” - Essential Marketing “The company and the product are very easy to work with. Highly recommended!” - Sales AI Inc “Excellent to work with, fantastic customer support and a product I cannot speak highly enough of!”

- Drive Social Media LLC

To become the utility company of the API economy, providing pipes and infrastructure.

Fraser Davidson CEO & Co-founder

integration application that seamlessly exists within the clients’ own application, invisible to the end user.

About the Company Cyclr is a white label, low-code platform for managing and publishing in-app integrations. It is an innovator in ‘Integration Platform as a Service’ (embedded IPaaS) for SaaS applications. It provides developers with an API connectivity solution that assists with the creation, publishing and maintenance of integrations within their own application.

Cyclr has a beautifully executed visual workflow tool that enables SaaS companies and application developers to easily deliver integrations to their end users. From one-click integrations through to complex automations, Cyclr is a deeply functional, easy to use, January 2019|

Cyclr provides a scalable connectivity framework, easy tools to design and build integrations, an API to let clients create any UI/UX they like or a simple method to launch and deliver integrations.

Cyclr continuously adds, extends and updates its library of API connectors, so its clients can focus on adding features to their core platform.

Cyclr helps developers create and launch their own integration library with 150+ API connectors. Cyclr provides a complete abstraction layer between APIs, reducing clients’ development and maintenance effort to almost nothing.

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About the CEO Fraser’s initial role at Cyclr was as strategy/fundraising/commercial advisor as part of the founding team. In Dec 2017 Fraser was invited into the business full-time as CEO as Cyclr transitioned from product: market fit ‘discovery’ into full commercialization. Currently, Fraser as the CEO is playing a very important role in making Cyclr the most intrinsic part of the SaaS industry.

Editor’s Pick

The

Impressive of

Impact

Organic Networking T

he main reason for the invention of website, Internet and technology devices that provides the platform for software to run and connect with each other is mainly to make networking of services, products and people possible. Technology leaders such as Cisco, Arista and Apple are dedicating their resources to provide various business enterprises and the masses the ability to communicate their values through technology mediums called as Networking.

The works and provisions of these organizations are very outstanding, and are believed to last for ages. This is because the growth of technology is not going out of style so soon, but rather it is believed to continue into the future.

Technology networking strategies is good, but to make it more effective there is the incessant need to incorporate organic strategies.

You may be asking what I mean by Organic Networking or Strategies. The organization that will survive in the market in the near future, considering the increasing rate of competition are the ones who take the necessary steps, to develop more human connection for their business, more than they do for machines such as provided by AI. The Factors to Consider for an Effective Organic Networking: Even as our age is encouraging more of technology strategies, if we must survive the future of it all, then we must connect more people, than we do for machines. As an

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innovative networking solution provider, it is going to pay more, when you include human intelligence and physicality in your networking strategies over machines.

Imagine a day that the machines are going to have a serious breakdown, and the owner organization do not have the capable persons to ďŹ gure out the cause of the breakdown and possibly provide a feasible solution? What will be the fate of the organization? This means that, there will be a great loss of value and possibly a strike off the industry. I know you would never want that to happen. So, plan from now, to never pay for the loss in the future.

Balance Your People to machine Deployment.

Social Medias are for networking, Newspapers and various Medias are also for networking, but there are people behind the arc of this innovation. The more you incorporate AI and machine learning strategies, always remember the need for Control Engineers and those are human beings.

The most successful organizations identify the major importance of January 2019|

people networking and how best to utilize human intelligence in their business quest.

For example; if you write an article and share it on a website, who do you expect to read your article; human beings or machines? It is obvious that the organic networking aspect of computing will never go out of style; else, there will be a day in the future that digital connection and values will be measured on the number of bots that read your articles and/or that paid for your services. So, remember to balance the rate of your people to machine deployment, by acknowledging the need of human networking over technology networking.

The Need for Organic Sense in Networking and the Future: Technology is the miracle of our age, ArtiďŹ cial Intelligence is a major molding factor of this development, IoT is the liberator from machine isolation by providing the platform to interconnect millions of them over the virtual platforms, but humans make these things possible.

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Networking is an innovative concept with high proďŹ le technology terms. If one does not implore deep interest and concentration while exploring this realm, there may be a serious distortion of original motive of indulgence, and this can lead to serious breakdown of enterprise infrastructure. Sometimes, it maybe direct and other times, it will be indirect, but in all, it will always have an impact. The future of technology is very bright, and that is mainly dependent on how available we make the resources to help manage what we have today in the near future. For this to be possible, the networking solution providers must incorporate more of organic sense in their solutions and industry advancements.

Technology will advance, more machines will be connected, devices will be programmed to run independently, but in all these things, the humans in the network will still rule the universe. The more organic you make your networking strategies, the lesser the fear of a disastrous future for your organization.

The

Best Performing

10API Solution Providers, 2019

Jitterbit Taking the API Industry by Storm

I

n 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.

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.”

Design Studio - Jitterbit’s design platform allowing customers to design, test, and deploy their integration projects.

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 re-used 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.

API Manager - Jitterbit’s API management solution that developers can quickly and securely expose data from existing apps as APIs, publish

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

The Jitterbit Harmony API platform comes with the following three products:

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January 2019|

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 rulesbased 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

January 2019|

Jitterbit is the only platform on the market that accelerates Digital Transformations from months to weeks, empowering companies to make faster, more effective decisions.

Simon Peel Chief Strategy Ofcer and Chief Marketing Ofcer

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 sunsynchronous orbit using the LauncherOne rocket, which is airlaunched from a modified Boeing 747 called Cosmic Girl. To achieve this,

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they’re binding together Machine Learning, Augmented Reality, Humanmachine collaboration, IoT, Oracle EBS (for ERP) Teamcenter 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.

The

Best Performing

10API Solution Providers, 2019

Loop AI Labs: Creating a New Era of Cognitive Technology

W

ith the growing ecosystem for smart applications, APIdriven services have marked a radical growth in the market.

The interest of businesses has grown towards cognitive API. A cognitive API requires specialized knowledge about how a particular set of data should be used to achieve a desired outcome.

Taking this requirement into consideration, Loop AI Labs designed its unique “Human Capacity Cognitive Computing” platform, Loop Q to encapsulate that knowledge behind the API.

organizations as a complete, onpremise, autonomous cognitive computing solution. Loop Q is an individual human capacity cognitive computing platform, deployed securely within the client’s data center as a dedicated hardware and software appliance, and it also includes the availability of Cloud deployment.

Arriving as a blank slate, Loop Q’s unique learning approach allows it to learn the specifics of an organization’s domain autonomously, requiring no resource-heavy human guidance, labeled data, or extra programming.

Founded in 2012, Loop AI Labs is a global leader in unsupervised Cognitive Computing based solutions for Digital Transformation and Cognitive Robotic Process Automation. The company is currently helping major sectors of the economy including banks and financial services, insurance, telecommunications and media, automotive, manufacturing, utilities, and logistics. It is enabling these sectors to benefit from the efficiencies of a new era of cognitive technology by augmenting the capacity of their current workforce, by adding self-learning digital Cognitive Robots, and by helping organizations prepare for their future demand.

Learning the workflows and language from its human peers, Loop Q is able to understand the specific nuances of an organization’s communications, lingo, product names, workflows, and data in any language. Knowledge that once required two years of learning by a human can be processed by Loop Q in 15 minutes. Due to its unlimited and unaided approach, Loop Q works as the central brain that powers all cognitively-enabled applications, Cognitive Robotic Process Automation (RPA), and the cognitive retrofitting of existing legacy systems. Together with the company’s network of Loop Certified Partners, Loop AI Labs builds out full Cognitive Roadmaps that increase productivity and savings and reduce errors within the enterprise. On the horizon, it will bring cognitive computing to larger audiences in smaller spaces, incorporating the power of Loop Q for reasoning on

An Unsupervised Cognitive Computing Solution Loop AI Labs’ technical team spent several years of R&D prior to the release of Loop Q, which it licenses to

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smart devices and other Edgecomputing cases.

With Loop Certified Partners for system integration, users get specialized training to ensure that they know how to leverage the API to the greatest effect.

Idealistic Visionaries After founding several successful companies in Europe, Loop AI Labs’ CEO, Gianmauro Calafiore came to Silicon Valley looking for people to help realize his vision for an AI company. There he found Dr. Bart Peintner and Dr. Patrick Ehlen, now CTO and Chief Scientist respectively, who were key contributors to the largest AI research endeavor in history, the DARPA CALO project.

Over the years of R&D, they drew on a blend of sciences to devise a unique AI system that is versatile, scalable, smart, and fast. The result became the humanemulated intelligence that is now Loop Q. While working on the DARPA CALO project at SRI and Stanford, Dr. Peintner and Dr. Ehlen, both, observed first-hand the problems of developing massive and overly ambitious AI systems.

Dr. Patrick Ehlen recalls, “CALO was like the Human Genome Project, a bloated undertaking with a million places where things could go wrong or

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get bogged down.” Seeing the success of another CALO-related spinoff—Siri—that was laser-focused in scope, they chose a different track. “We focused on creating a lean and versatile system, like Craig Venter’s ’shotgun sequencing’ approach to genomics. The result was marvelous,” he adds.

When IDC published its first report that established the Cognitive Market, Loop AI Labs had just launched operations and became a recommended software vendor by IDC. Shortly after, Ovum Research published a dedicated report describing Loop Q’s ability to distill knowledge from dark data.

Inclusion in the 2017 CB Insights AI 100 provided massive visibility and global inbound from companies that wanted to meet Loop AI Labs. A recent partnership with LINK Mobility scales Loop Q’s usability to include over 234 million end users in small and medium enterprises across Europe.

A Simplified Approach In the near-term, APIs will be made even more accessible. Loop AI Labs has partnered with Blue Prism and is now a part of its Digital Exchange, a marketplace where business users can select components and effectively use APIs to do a multitude of business tasks, including cognitive computing.

This simplified approach allows nonprogrammers to do what used to require specialized API programming.

Now enterprises can use components, like Blue Prism RPA & Loop Q, on top of their existing legacy systems giving them full cognitive robotic process automation capabilities and not just cognitive features. The integration enables clients to evolve from traditional RPA to Cognitive RPA and create robots that learn by observing the actual work performed by human teams, rather than manually-created rule sets. In the longer-term, AI-based learning will ultimately allow systems to learn from each other, rendering APIs as we know them, obsolete.

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We envision a world where cognitive services and products will transform our workplaces and personal lives.

Gianmauro Calaore CEO

Exemplifying Satisfaction of Customers “Lutech has been a partner of Loop AI Labs’ for almost three years. From the beginning, I’ve been impressed by the vision and the high-level innovation of the unsupervised cognitive computing Loop Q platform. Lutech has made significant investments to maintain the certification levels required by Loop AI Labs, and we had important returns both on the market and as a positioning driver on our best customers. Loop AI Labs is really a pioneer in the field of the cognitive computing that is becoming more and more an integral part of any business solution.” – Tullio Pirovano, CEO at Lutech SpA - Group OEP (One Equity Partners) “Proud, that our HPC servers contribute to boost the benefits generated by the Digital Transformation Programs of large Enterprise Organizations. By

37

leveraging the introduction of Cognitive Computing in their own core business processes, they are able to understand and manage unstructured data, emulating just how human beings do it, with the Loop Q Unsupervised Cognitive Computing Platform of our Partner Loop AI Labs.” – Stefano Venturi, President and CEO, Hewlett Packard Enterprise in Italy, Vice President Hewlett Packard Enterprise Inc.

Green

Energy Efcient Technology

Cloud Computing Saving Energy through Technology

T

he rapid expansion in data centers, due to the exponential growth of the cloud computing has caused the dramatic increase in energy consumption and its effect on the environment in terms of the carbon footprints. To reduce the power consumption, it is required to develop some energy efficient solutions. The Green Computing is the practice of executing policies and the procedures to improve efficiency of the computing resources in such a way as to reduce the energy consumption and environmental impact of their utilization. Green Cloud Architecture is rising from these trends leading, not only to energy efficiency, but also a carbon emission aware concept. In order to reduce energy consumption, a greener environment needs to be built.

Among all industries, the information communication technology (ICT) industry is arguably responsible for a larger portion of the worldwide growth in energy consumption. The goal of green cloud computing is to promote the recyclability or biodegradability of defunct products and factory waste by reducing the use of hazardous materials and maximizing the energy efficiency during the product's lifetime.

Energy to be saved The objective is to reduce power consumption of the data center. It offers the features like online monitoring, live virtual machine migration, and optimization of Virtual Machine Placement. Through this proposed Green Cloud Architecture, energy up to 27% can be saved. The need to manage multiple applications in a data center creates the challenge of on-demand resource provisioning and allocation in response to time-varying workloads. Data center resources are statically possessed to applications, based on the peak load characteristics, in order to provide performance guarantees and to maintain the isolation.

Energy-efficient resource management has been first introduced in the context of battery fed mobile devices, where energy consumption has to be reduced in order to improve the battery lifetime. Techniques which are developed for mobile devices also can be applied or adapted for servers and data centers; this kind of systems requires specific methods.

The primary method is to consolidate the Dynamic Voltage Frequency Scaling technique in an efficient way to maximize the resource utilization and to minimize energy consumption of the datacenters which will result in the reduced

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January 2019|

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carbon footprints and thus will help more in achieving the Green Computing.

The Green Benefits Cloud computing is the way to save money and energy for the business. Users emphasize Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and can improve their manageability and facilitate the maintenance of the resources. It means that benefit of business enterprises implicates to avoid spending on software and infrastructure resources, and allow business clients to focus on earning money rather than being weighted down with infrastructure concerns. Therefore, operating this model allows reducing the consummation of the power energy without spending money on running the servers.

Moreover, with no servers to repair, the absence of hardware to upgrade and no software to install, labor costs are also reduced.

With SaaS software accesses usually through a browserbased client, i.e., it can run on virtually any authorized computer, making desktop and laptop resources easily replaceable. Thus, when the user also saves on the support, it doubles the impact and in fact increases green role in business. The employees can work remotely, traveling and moving from one place to another because they have fast access to the internet and the ability to use all the services at hand, on the other hand, it reduces the consumption of fossil fuels and the harmful pollution that results from vehicle emissions as well.

The reduction of energy and power consumption has become a first-order objective in the design of modern computing systems. The roots of energy-efficient computing, practices can be traced back to 1992, when the U.S. environmental protection agency had launched Energy Star, a voluntary labeling program which was designed to identify and promote the energy-efficient products in order to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions. Computers and monitors were the first labeled products. This has led to the widespread adoption of the sleep mode in electronic devices. The term “green computing” was introduced to refer to the energy-efficient personal computers.

Interesting Research Findings While deploying data center, the sole concern is high-performance, and this demand has been fulfilled without paying much attention to the energy consumption. An average data center guzzles energy as much as 25,000 households. There is a necessity to move the focus to optimizing for energy efficiency while maintaining high service level performance than optimizing data center resource management for pure performance, as the energy cost is increasing while the availability dwindles. According to certain reports, the total estimated energy bill for data centers in the year 2010 was $11.5 billion and energy costs in a typical data center doubles every five years.

For the development of cloud computing and it to sustain green technologies is exceedingly essential. Of the numerous green methodologies enquired, the DVFS technology is a highly hardware oriented approach and hence it is less flexible.

Cloud computing is a highly scalable and cost-effective infrastructure for running an enterprise and the web applications. But the critical issue is the drastic surge in the energy consumption of data centers which is triggering by the growing demand for cloud infrastructure. Hence, the energy-efficient solutions are required which results in less number of carbon footprints and thus help in achieving greener computing.

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The

Best Performing

10API Solution Providers, 2019

NEVERDIE: Connecting Games and Virtual Worlds via the blockchain n an interview with Insights Success, Michael Kirkham, the Lead Developer of NEVERDIE Studios, unveils his valuable insights on taking the company to the fore-front of new technology and global culture. The Company is bridging the abyss between independent games and virtual worlds by providing turnkey API for interoperable utility and skill tokens on the blockchain.

I

Recently, we launched the NEVERDIE Coin (NDC) and Teleport token (TPT) as well as a myriad of Ethereum ERC20 Skill and Attribute tokens to support an inclusive and interconnected Virtual World economy on the blockchain, designed to create real jobs and opportunity for gamers in online worlds by enabling them to earn interoperable tradable skills as they play.

Below are the highlights of the interview:

The Developer API is the first of its kind that provides the fastest onboarding solution to game developers who want to integrate blockchain technology into their projects. The biggest advantage to developers is that they get to tap into a large community of gamers with gaming assets and skills that are interoperable. This revolution in gaming, promises to bring longevity to games, which has never existed before, by enabling gamers to monetize their time spent in playing one game and carry it forward into the next game.

Give us a brief overview of your company, its uniqueness and its vision.

NEVERDIE has been at the forefront of pioneering Virtual World economies since 2003, and was instrumental in the creation of intrinsic value in Virtual Real estate, setting the Guinness World Record for the Most Valuable Virtual Item inside Entropia Universe. As the founder of the MMOWC, NEVERDIE is also an early pioneer in Massive Multiplayer Online eSports and has licensed and developed major IP for virtual worlds including KING KONG in Partnership with Universal and Pop Icon Michael Jackson.

What are the cutting-edge products/solutions offered by your company?

The NEVERDIE Crypto Wallet, Developer API & Dragon King. Each

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product offers an integral component to completing the vision of an interoperable decentralized gaming ecosystem. The NEVERDIE Wallet acts as a tool for gamers to track, trade, and store their blockchain gaming assets while at the same time providing a simple method to interact with other crypto assets including Litecoin, Bitcoin and all Ethereum tokens.

Our Developer API creates the fastest way for non-crypto centric developers to integrate their games into the blockchain with a turnkey solution to providing their players with interoperable skills with intrinsic value. We set out to bridge this gap by creating simple and elegant methods for developers to interact with the blockchain and the NEVERDIE Wallet.

Dragon King is the first game created using our Developer API. Dragon King uses the blockchain to send/receive crypto assets, store users’ items/inventory and decentralizes the outcome of battles within the game. Since Dragon King allows players to gain crypto assets it is critical that users can verify that the methods in which decisions were made can be independently verified.

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Describe the experiences, achievements or lessons learnt that have shaped the journey of your company.

NEVERDIE was a driving force in the explosion of Virtual Worlds from 2003-2010 after which the growth of highly immersive MMORPG’S stagnated despite their popularity and the licensing of AAA IP. The biggest lesson of all is that No Game can be an Island and expect to survive and maintain growth. We’ve evidently comprehended that connecting games and creating a legitimate virtual goods ecosystem is essential to continued growth.

What are the challenges faced while providing API solutions and how is your company serving to tackle them?

The biggest challenge faced was ensuring that we could take the complexity of the blockchain and widdle it down to a format that would be appealing and powerful for developers.

What according to you could be the potential future of API solutions and how does your company envision sustaining its competency?

January 2019|

Get Ready to Live Forever.

Michael Kirkham Lead Developer

It is essential to minimize the cost for game developers to create games for the blockchain. API solutions are the key to off the shelf functionality and connectivity. We will sustain our competency by remaining active in the balancing of interoperable skills, items and utilities to be used as a standard in blockchain gaming.

NEVERDIE understands the hopes and aspirations of gamers like no other developer and was a major catalyst in driving the first round of investment into game development on the blockchain. NEVERDIE’s ambitious ideas are always food for thought even for the biggest game developers in the world as they enter the new world of the blockchain.

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About the Developer: Michael Kirkham is the lead developer at NEVERDIE Studios with over 15 years of experience on the cutting edge of Fintech and Media. His contributions in the Fintech Space have culminated in the launch of 4 AAA Game titles including projects for Universal Studios.

Michael has spearheaded advanced game engine development for Cryengine, Unreal and Unity with a principal focus on bringing fintech tools into the games market

Maestro’s Insights

Looking for or Using an EDI Tool?

A Few Things you ought to Know

Tom Kieley CEO & Co-founder

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January 2019|

W

e run into many companies who are interested in implementing an EDI tool or are already using EDI and “don’t have supplier pain”. Although there are valid reasons to adopt an EDI solution, before you take the plunge there are a few things you ought to know.

EDI, at its core, is data transformation between trading partners.

When you start digging deeper into the capabilities there are no built-in analytics, collaboration, or scoring of buyers or suppliers and ultimately no strategic value to drive supplier performance to meet your business requirements.

One of the number one issues with EDI is the total cost of ownership. EDI is expensive to implement for both the customer and supplier. The tool itself is normally expensive but maintaining it can be costly to customize and use countless man hours for upkeep. If there is a change in the ERP system, typically a change is needed in the EDI tool as well. Changes in documents, i.e. invoices (EDI 810) and purchase orders (EDI 850) or purchase order Acknowledgements (EDI 855) can break EDI transmissions causing downtime and expense to all parties.

Another challenge can be supplier adoption. The main reason you invest in a tool like EDI is closer buyer and supplier relationships and visibility. When you ask a supplier to adopt a heavy tool like EDI and possibly make them pay for the opportunity to do so, you can create friction as opposed to bringing them closer together. Also, few organizations have successfully implemented EDI with 100% of their supplier chain. Which means your organization will have to manage two procurement processes. A special one for your EDI suppliers, and a separate one for your non-EDI suppliers, i.e. ‘supplier collaboration’ via manual email communication.

Regarding communication, EDI system transmissions are limited to an authorized set of documents, rules and transactions. Other communications have to be handled by traditional siloes systems like emails, spreadsheets, and phone calls. If you need to pull in, push out, or expedite a purchase order, then you’ll need email, not EDI. Plus, when EDI processes break, all order processing completely STOPS and requires IT involvement to resolve, which can be costly and time consuming. The last thing to keep in mind when considering an EDI tool is even a 1-cent part by a nonEDI supplier can completely stop production.

Your supply chain is only as strong as your weakest link (or weakest vendor), so suppliers not using EDI can cripple production. Even though you may be using or considering EDI, your supply chain deserves 100% coverage with a process that is driving your suppliers to operate at the highest level as it relates to your changing demand.

January 2019|

About the Author Tom Kieley, is a CEO and Co-founder of SourceDay. As a veteran business owner, Tom knows how to recruit top talent and build a lean team to manage growth. He is also good at conveying company vision and goals to employees, partners and anyone else interested in PO management. But it’s the execution of that vision that makes him such an asset for SourceDay. Tom wears many hats, but his priority is maintaining key relationships and providing oversight across SourceDay. His decade plus of experience in product management and operations, hardware and software sales, and supply chain management fosters his creative ideas around how best to achieve the goals that lead to company success.

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