Cloud is here and now. It is no longer the next big thing in the IT space. Applications built over the Cloud offer the much needed flexibility and scalability for accommodating thousands of concurrent users at the same time. Application development and management can be easily handled by teams located globally. It does not require specific software configuration on the local client machines. Besides, these applications over the Cloud can be easily accessed, maintained, triaged, and trouble-shooted, anytime anywhere.

API Management involves developing and publishing application programming interfaces or APIs, controlling their access, tapping and analysing application usage statistics, and generating reports for performance management.

APIs are used to make application architecture more composable and integrable with other applications. API management is a best practice in the overall application lifecycle. It allows improving the abstraction levels of an application to offer improved integration and a strategic edge.

APIs and API management, in general, allow businesses to modernize their existing IT application landscape and offer seamless user experience, such as secure single sign-on and integrating commercial-off-the-shelf products in agile and resilient enterprise architecture.

Business requirements change from time to time and not all commercial off-the-shelf products from different OEMs offer a complete solution to business requirements. System Integrators address the business requirement to provide a complete solution. They are aware of the pros and cons of products available in the market and can tailor solutions while trying to eliminate technical debt. They help businesses to consider a wide variety of software options available and shortlist the best ones for an upgrade. However, it has to be noted that the existing investments and customizations should be easily reusable in the new environment. Maintaining continuity with a selective pick and choose between existing environment pros and the new options available in the market is a best practice. The customizations in the new environment should be over the top so that they can be easily carried forward to the next big upgrade.

For example: Migrating the SAP BO environment to MS Power BI looks like a mighty leap away from the closed SAP architecture. However, SAP BO's current versions have limited capabilities for DIY reporting and Cloud leverage. Hence migrating to MS Power BI, which provides the limitless capability for self-service reporting sans dependency on huge IT developer teams, makes perfect business sense till SAP rolls out its agile yet rugged reporting feature that can be leveraged over the Cloud. Besides MS Power BI has the capability to reuse and accommodate the existing universes and customized semantic layers, dashboards, and reports from the As-Is environment to the To-Be environment over the Cloud.

24x7 L1, L2, L3 support is an ideal scenario in Application Modernization and Application Management. However, the customer business has to judiciously select the preferred Application Management and Support model that suits their business requirement and budget. Businesses can opt for 8x5 and 16x5 models within the ambits of predefined SLAs and turnaround time.