In a digitally connected era, businesses are bound to incorporate data integration as the number of applications, data, and devices are rising day by day. Simply put, envisioning an integrated view of your users will help your business keep up with global digitalization.The ability to integrate data, services, and events across systems on-premises or via cloud is a critical need that should be addressed.

According to the 2020 Connectivity Benchmark Report on the state of IT and digital transformation conducted by MuleSoft, research findings say 3 out of 4 companies will attain negative revenue impact if they don’t transform digitally within a year. This study used a sample of 800 CIOs and IT decision makers (ITDMs) in organizations with at least 1,000 employees.

Digital transformation has widely become a strategic imperative for businesses. MuleSoft’s new study clearly explains how businesses are under increasing pressure to digitally transform, and struggling to overcome a common obstacle. 85% of organizations reported integration challenges slow down the pace of their digital transformation, with more than half still providing disconnected customer experiences across channels.

Out of almost 900 different applications used by the average business, only 28% of those applications are integrated. This prevents a single view of the customer and that leads to a situation where more than half of businesses are unable to provide connected experiences to their end customers.

This study highlights new opportunities and challenges for businesses as they digitally transform and sheds light on how businesses are failing to capture the full value of APIs without a company-wide strategy. Above all, this report clearly explains how API reuse is directly linked to speed of innovation, operational efficiency and revenue.

Read the full Connectivity Benchmark Report here.

As we all know, the retail industry is becoming ever more competitive. Traditional retail supply chain technologies are unable to transform retailers’ business operations and processes in a meaningful way.

A study by MuleSoft says more than half of global consumers (58%) are saddled with a disconnected experience across channels and about 60% of them are thinking about changing retailers due to this issue. Retailers are keen to integrate and unify data sources and applications to meet consumer expectations and they need to unlock customer, product, and purchase history data from core retail systems, legacy applications and more to accomplish that.

This is where the significance of MuleSoft’s unique API-led approach to connectivity becomes clear. With MuleSoft’s API-driven approach, retailers can reuse APIs to substantially accelerate the delivery of connected customer experiences. At the same time, they can unlock customer and product data from legacy systems. Retailers can be empowered to facilitate a personalized customer engagement in a faster way with new connected experiences including real-time inventory visibility and mobile checkout. With MuleSoft, retailers can innovate 3x faster using pre-built integration assets, best practices and recommended architectures to create new experiences on and offline.

Read the complete story on how APIs and integrations power the connected customer experiences of today and tomorrow with MuleSoft here.