The High Cost of the Growing IT Delivery Gap

The current wave of innovative technologies—from mobile and the internet of things to the cloud, analytics and artificial intelligence—is pushing business and employees to move at much faster speeds. But with IT still limited to a relatively fixed set of resources and facing constraints on the ability to deliver on new projects, an IT delivery gap is threatening to hold back business. Such is the takeaway of a recent survey, "Connectivity Benchmark Report 2017," from cloud integration platform provider MuleSoft. In surveying 951 IT decision-makers from global companies that employ more than 500 people, MuleSoft discovered that these pressures have spurred IT departments to turn to APIs to meet their integration needs, enable self-service IT and unlock data silos. "The IT delivery gap is one of the biggest threats to businesses today, as speed and real-time access now help determine a business' success," said Ross Mason, founder and vice president of product strategy for MuleSoft. "In order to deliver products faster to market, establish new global presences and change existing processes to meet market demands, we're seeing our customers increasingly invest in and benefit from an API-led approach to connectivity. Driving an internal API economy allows IT to securely open up legacy systems and free business-critical data that the wider organization relies on to achieve business outcomes faster than the competition."