Chaos or Calm in the Value Chain?

Having determined that APIs play a major role in your organisations Value Chain it is important that a structure is put in place that can fully manage this strategy. APIs need to be managed; versioned and secured. If you want to meet the demands of your organisation. You will want to make sure that duplication of effort is avoided by being able to search available APIs. You will probably want…

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Building Bridges to Digital Islands

Collaborative working relationships are the reality for any industry. By building closer partnerships up and down the supply chain with suppliers, distributors and customers, organisations improve performance, reduce time-to-market and costs, thus improving profit, providing room to innovative. Your suppliers, partners and customers are all critical to your business success and profitability. They require immediate and secure access to relevant data to help them make important decisions on your behalf, to maintain…

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Open-Source Testing Tools for API development – Part 2

Author: John Ormerod, W3Partnership Limited Date: January 2017 Introduction In part 1 of this series, I covered my experience with: API Definition Unit Testing. In this (part 2), I cover: Calling APIs: Test Clients This will be followed by two more: Part 3 Function and Load Tests SoapUI JMeter Part 4 Mocking back-end services Some of the tools were recommended by colleagues on projects, some I discovered and the rest…

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Open-Source Testing Tools for API development – Part 1

Author: John Ormerod, W3Partnership Limited Date: December 2016 Copyright Copyright subsists in all W3Partnership publications. Except as permitted by Copyright Law, no extract may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without the prior permission in writing from W3Partnership. © W3Partnership Limited (2016) Contact Address: W3Partnership Limited 18a Kendale Hemel Hempstead Hertfordshire, HP3 8NN…

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How black was your Friday?

From being a purely American phenomenon, the idea of Black Friday sales has rapidly caught on elsewhere in the last few years. 2016 saw Black Friday sales in the UK reach their highest level for two years (AUTHORITY URL: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4007712/Black-Friday-sales-reached-highest-level-two-years.html) with more than £1.2 billion being spent online alone) Black Friday represents a pre-Christmas boost for retailers and a useful extension to the holiday shopping period. But the success of their…

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Unlock the Potential of your Applications & Data

When dealing with customers, partners and suppliers, organisations want a complete picture of their interactions. Many organisations take a CRM system as their 1st point of Interaction. To get the ideal single view, the CRM system may need to interact with many backend databases and systems of record. The problem that is encountered is that to make a change in one of the databases or systems of record, requires a change in…

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APIS, multi-tiered application architecture and Microservices- An Investigation

  Author: John Ormerod Date: August 2016     Contents Introduction 3 What is the Problem? 3 Case Study 4 What is a Multi-tier Architecture? 5 Why is a multi-tier architecture so effective? 6 What is a Microservice? 8 Why Use Microservices? 8 Monolithic applications 8 Characteristics of a Microservice 9 How do Microservices and a Multi-tiered Architecture Fit Together? 9 Re-use and Change when using an API-led Tiered Architecture…

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Unlocking data to provide customer insights

Information has always been key to understanding customers. In the days before information technology this manifested itself in the business owner knowing his or her clients and their tastes, asking after their children and generally building a positive relationship. In the information age things are, perhaps, a little more removed, but businesses have the potential to know more about their customers than ever before. Every transaction leaves a trail and…

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Bourne or Bond. Which one are you in the API world?

The two best known spy film genres are Jason Bourne and James Bond. The two on the face of it do a very similar job, but the way they go about it are subtly different. James Bond is suave, sophisticated, independent. Yet if you drill a little deeper, James is very dependent on the whole of MI6 to deliver his service. After all where would 007 be without Q &…

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How Data is transforming the retail landscape.

With the collapse in the past few years of many household names, most recently BHS and Austin Reed, it’s easy to conclude that the traditional high street retailing model is broken. Yet there are traditional Bricks and Mortar organisations that have been able to transform the shopper experience, through the use of technology to both boost their sales online, but more importantly and often crucially, to drive shoppers to their…

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