Data, APIs to accelerate application economy: CA Tech

The so-called application economy — which CA Technologies believes will fuel customer relationships and productivity within employees — is being accelerated by three disruptive forces that enterprises need to be prepared for, according to Amit Chatterjee, CA Technologies enterprise solutions and technology executive vice president.

Speaking at CA World '14 in Las Vegas on Tuesday, Chatterjee kicked off his keynote by outlining that enterprises have "big challenges" ahead of them. He said that there will be expectations for enterprises to deliver new applications in legacy infrastructures, maintain control of their SaaS and cloud offerings, and collect data while meeting end-user demands.

Chatterjee advised that in order for enterprises to navigate around the expectations, they need to prepare for the three disruptive forces: Unwired enterprise, ambient data, and API-assembled applications.

According to Chatterjee, the unwired enterprise will see the Internet of Things and the BYOD trends magnified where there will be "no parameters, no on and off switches, no log-on, no connected Wi-Fi". Rather, it would be "an era of perpetual connectivity". In turn, enterprises will be responsible for ensuring that all of their employees, customers, and partners are personally connected to the business, which will be "logarithmically more complex" than catering to the BYOD movement.

"Imagine what it would take to connect those people and their devices, because their devices are going to come from multiple manufacturers on multiple operating systems that are clearly going to have multiple standards. So how are you going to manage all of this and secure it?" he said.

Based on Gartner's predictions, device proliferation excluding PCs, tablets, and smartphones will increase by 30 fold in the next decade, which will be equivalent to approximately 26 billion devices.

"We're now facing over 200 billion connected devices in total worldwide, and they're going to hit your enterprise — hard. The volume of the data it will create will simply be enormous; it will flow across networks at unprecedented velocity and volume, creating a tidal wave of data in your organisation and an enormous pressure on your infrastructure," Chatterjee said.

He went on to say that enterprises will also need to prepare for a reversal of how data will be consumed, given that in five years' time, 70 percent of the world's data will be unstructured in comparison to today, where that same amount is currently structured.

"Data is not going be in the cloud as siloed structures or databases on mobile devices; data is simply going to be out there, generated by sources within your control as well as outside your control. The ability to capture it and turn it into insight will create business advantage," Chatterjee said.

Chatterjee added that when enterprises use APIs to assemble applications, it will accelerate their ability to meet market demands, because it will mean that application setups happen faster and therefore more frequently. This is a market in which CA Technologies plans to move more into by helping customers figure out how to build applications without relying on packaged applications.

"There are companies already doing this. For Salesforce.com, 50 percent of their revenue is generated by APIs, Twitter is processing 50 billion API transactions a day, [and] for Amazon that number borders 1 trillion. To win in whatever industry you're in, you're going to have to master APIs, and use them to build competitive advantage," he said.

Aimee Chanthadavong travelled as a guest of CA Technologies to CA World '14.