What is an API ? how API will work

 What is an Application Programming Interface(API)?

An API is a set of instructions that allows two software applications to communicate with each other. APIs can be used for many purposes, such as retrieving information from a database, sending data between two pieces of software, or showing content from one website to another.

Developing an API is a process that takes time and effort. The first step in developing an API is to create the interface (or "API spec") which documents how the end user should interact with the system. Then developers need to build out the functionality needed by the interface and finally test it before releasing it to customers.

How API Will Work 

An API is a software component that provides a way for other applications to interact with one another. It can be seen as a sort of middleware between two systems, like an operating system and an application.

APIs are the most efficient way for developers to share their code and data with other developers. They are also the easiest way for custom software developers to use third-party services in their own apps.

The best thing about APIs is that they are very easy to understand and use, so even beginners can start building new features into their apps or websites by using someone else’s API.

An API is a set of functions and protocols that allow two computer programs to interact with each other. APIs are used when one program needs to provide data or services to another program.

Enterprise Service Business Intelligence Solutions

 What Is Enterprise Business Intelligence (BI)?

Enterprise Business Intelligence (BI) is a set of tools and processes for analyzing data from business operations for companies to gain a competitive advantage. Analyzing data in this way reveals opportunities to improve customer satisfaction, increase revenue, and raise profit margins. According to Tech Jury, 56% of organizations leveraged BI in 2020 and reported faster and more effective decision-making.

How Enterprise Business Intelligence Helps Uncover Hidden Value In Business Operations Data

Enterprise Business Intelligence can help uncover hidden value by using historical information and predictive analytics to:

• Recognize Current Trends
• Predict Future Trends
• Identify business Opportunities
• Identify Business Risks
• Assess Customer Sentiment

 

BI analytics leverages operational data from many areas throughout the company. For example:

• Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
• Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
• Social Media
• Email
• Website Analytics
• Helpdesk Ticketing System

This operational data encompasses transactional information (orders, bills, support tickets, etc.) and associated assets such as chat transcripts, images, videos, PDF documents, etc.

The data in these systems is helpful. However, in isolation, they only tell a partial story. BI combines information from these systems to permit holistic analysis and development of a unified perspective on particular customers, questions, issues, problems or theses. All of which ultimately drives decisions on how to improve your company by developing strategies to be a market leader, gaining a competitive edge or serving an unserved market.

How Enterprise Business Intelligence Helps Companies Gain A Competitive Edge

In today’s digital-first world, gaining a competitive edge is more complex than it has historically been. BI uncovers opportunities to position your company as a market leader.

Improved Customer Satisfaction

BI provides information that helps companies deliver personalized experiences that have a significant customer impact. Today’s technology-aware customers are used to the “wow” factor. They want to interact with brands that prioritize using technology to deliver meaningful experiences. They expect personalized digital experiences that make them feel special and valued. A few examples are:

• Improved Customer Support: When a customer contacts support, whoever helps them would be able to see a complete picture of the customer such as Their purchase history, what areas of the website they spent the longest, what types of questions they viewed in the FAQ section, what other support contact they’ve made or even the sales rep they worked with. Having access to this information in one system helps the support person provide customized support service based on the customer’s history with the company.
• Identifying Customers Who Are Likely to Abandon a Service Or Product: A BI system can analyze information to determine whether a customer will cancel services. Using that information, the company can offer a special incentive to encourage them to stay.
• Resource Planning: Effective BI can predict demand for a product or service. That way, companies can identify days that are most likely to need additional staff to meet demand.

Drives Innovation for New Products

There are tremendous opportunities to innovate and provide new solutions to customers’ problems. Finding these opportunities is easier with information that reveals what matters most to them. It highlights areas where customers could benefit from new products. That’s why in a recent Forbes study, nearly 90% of R&D departments rate Cloud Business Intelligence as critical and important to current and new initiatives.

Innovation is what pushes a company to the front of the market. Without it, they are simply playing “catch up” to their competitors.

Improve Existing Products

Sometimes improving an existing product has the biggest impact on sales. Analyzing customer information such as help desk tickets or the most commonly viewed FAQ section of the website provides valuable insight. The opportunity lies in taking that information and developing solutions to address those items. Customers are more likely to stay with a company that addresses their needs.

Helps Inform Marketing Strategies

Marketing campaigns are only effective when they “speak to the customer.” The only way to improve the conversation is to communicate the information they find important. You can find out what’s important to them by analyzing your data. Using the insights from a BI tool, you’ll be able to:

• Enhance segmentation
• Measure marketing campaign effectiveness across channels
• Identify which products are selling the most in each market
• Identify new engagement tactics

How Enterprise Business Intelligence Impacts The Bottom Line

Ultimately, the real value in BI is the opportunity to improve the bottom line. Analytics tools keep you from wasting money. It helps you make decisions based on accurate information. When you use this information to understand customer needs, you only spend money on things that can address real needs and deliver positive results. Improving customer satisfaction improves the chances current customers will remain loyal customers. It also improves the chances of referral to other prospective customers. These types of data-driven opportunities and decisions are difficult to spot and make without a comprehensive data-oriented view of your company.

Next Steps

There’s a wealth of value in your operations data. Enterprise Business Intelligence is the key to understanding it and using it to inform your business strategy and operations decision-making. Contact us to connect with an Aezion BI expert to discuss how to use your data to uncover hidden value in your business operations data and leverage it to drive growth.

Docker Container-based Custom Application Management - what business leaders should know

Docker Containers have become an essential element in modern, high-performance IT operations practices — particularly in the cloud computing era. This article defines what containers are and why they are important to your business, whether you are responsible for just managing a single server or running IT operations at scale.

Docker Containers Background

IT operations are responsible for managing and maintaining an efficient and reliable computing infrastructure that supports the range of computing tasks performed by a business. These tasks are facilitated through enterprise resource planning applications that support Human Resources, Finance, Customer Relationship Management, Project Management, Operations Management and Workflow, Logistics, Reporting and Analytics, and more. While these applications differ in function all share a common dependence on efficient, reliable, and responsive computing resources. These resources include an operating system, processor, RAM, storage and networking elements. Historically, these individual elements were organized and managed as physical server units, then virtual machines with the advent of virtualization technology.

Virtual Machines improved overall computing resources and IT operations efficiency through increased sharing of physical hosts and host files and libraries. This reduction in physical servers and increased utilization of host files and libraries led to a reduction in Capital and Operations Expenditure, and improvements in Developer and Customer Experience. 

Containers extend the efficiency trajectory of Virtual machines by allowing apps to run in a dramatically simplified and light-weight environment compared to physical servers and virtual machines. Containers disassociate dedicated application dependencies from shareable OS elements. These shareable elements are abstracted and packaged as single-instance, shareable resources that further improve resource utilization. 

Containers and Docker

Containers were introduced as an extension of the Linux Operating System in 2001. They are an evolution and formalization of namespace isolation and resource governance techniques used in pre-Linux Operating Systems such as Solaris Zones, Unix chroot and BSD Jails. The Docker Container specification presented a common packaging model, test and deployment model that dramatically simplified containerization and application deployment on Linux hosts. The specification was realized as Docker images that contained shared host and VM files and libraries. This evolution led to further improvement in computing resource utilization — maximizing resource sharing by eliminating VM-related overhead — and significant improvement in IT operations and application management. The result is further improvement in Capital Expenditure, Operations Expenditure, and Customer Experience. 

The benefits of Docker Containers were introduced to Windows hosting environments with Windows Server 2016. To support this initiative, Microsoft established a partnership with Docker to extend the Docker API and toolset to support containers operating on Windows Server hosts. The Microsoft extensions permit the same Docker client to manage both Linux and Windows Server containers — extending Docker utility for Windows Server while preserving the DevOps efficiencies and user experience made possible by Docker. This initiative by Microsoft created a true win-win scenario for all parties.

Why Docker Containers are Important

Docker Containers are important for small and large IT operations. To understand this, let’s review the DevOps benefits of Docker-based containers:

1. Application performance improvements. This is enabled through the sharing a single Operating System kernel across multiple containers. The result is more efficient and granular application packaging, which in fast container startup and because the startup package is smaller and OS components are excluded from the container startup process. 
2. Faster Provisioning. Containers are dramatically faster to provide because they are significantly lighter-weight to build and define versus Virtual Machine images, and they are provisioned via software on pre-provisioned infrastructure. 
3. Efficient Resource Utilization. Containers are also more efficient at resource utilization than Virtual Machines with siloed OSs and OS-based resources.
4. Simple, high availability. This is because the containers can run on the different underlying hardware. If one host goes down, traffic can be re-routed from the Edge to live application containers running elsewhere.
5. Smooth scaling. Containers enable smooth scaling without downtime or architectural changes. Scaling is difficult with VM-centric hosting which requires rebooting, and often rearchitecting, to resize.
6. Configuration consistency. Every container can be exactly the same. The hosting platform is a large, resource sharing matrix. Containers are provisioned automatically on identical infrastructure managed via consistent, automated tools that minimizes server sync issues.

These are direct benefits if you are responsible for managing a large IT operation. You and your DevOps team can experience them in your day to day operations. However, these benefits also apply if you are responsible for administering a single server or even a single website. This is because best of breed hosting providers such as Azure or AWS (a) have platform economics that produces lower costs for comparable, small-to-large scale server deployments, and (b) have largely adopted containers — so by utilizing one of them you indirectly experience these benefits.