IBM - Best New API Management Solution

Company: IBM, Armonk, NY, USA
Company Description: IBM is a values-based enterprise of individuals who create & apply technology to make the world work better. Today, more than 400,000 IBM employees around the world invent and integrate hardware, software and services to help forward-thinking enterprises, institutions and people succeed on a smarter planet.
Nomination Category: Product & Service Categories - Business Technology Solutions
Nomination Sub Category: Application Programming Interface (API) Management Solution

Nomination Title: Tools & Technology that enrich User Experience

If this is a brand-new product, state the date on which it was released. If this is a new version of an existing product, state the date on which the update was released: Deployed in October 2019.

The IBM Sales Dashboard (ISD) is a Cloud native application, which sources data from multiple CRM Systems, sales metric tools, financial sources and provides Sales Leaders with the capability to access Real time AI enriched analytics from CRM tools and insights in support of Business reviews around the world in IBM.

The major objectives were to :

-Handle huge volumes of data across different data sources - Processing millions of rows of data and then rendering the transformed data in less than 3 Seconds

-Capability to drill up and drill down across all of IBM’s Go To Market level

-Embedded Complex Business rules - The Go to Market strategy for individual units is complex with unique data structures

This was achieved by building robust APIs. APIs in ISD provide complete data extraction, Business Logics, Calculations and data modelling via authenticated pathway. They reference the interface to retrieve data based on different search combinations, prompted by the user persona or selections. The data from different data sources is integrated and transformed into a meaningful data set using these APIs to provide analytical insights to the end Users. These APIs were written on Nodejs which query against a search Engine – ElasticSearch to fetch the sales data from different sources at lightning speed.

With the constantly changing business needs, the APIs in ISD were enhanced as needed:

-Covid-19 Pandemic - Sales Leaders had to strategize IBM Sales Operations to deal with challenges during the period, they needed advanced sales analytics which offers interactive and quantitative data analysis, for which the APIs were updated to accommodate the Perspective and Descriptive analysis that helped illuminate on how to get closer to our Clients by providing appropriate data insights

-APIs were embedded with hundreds of complex Business rules to support all the business critical metrics and Go To Market strategies as needed

-Interactive on Demand Dashboard – Users needed a platform to create their own analysis and insight for which the APIs were updated to dynamically build logic and queries on the fly based on the users actions/ needs.

Achievements

Improvised user experience across all required objectives

Performance: Rendering the data with in 3 seconds, Supports 6000+ concurrent users without any data latency and synced with Web and Mobile application.

Data Security: The data security between layers has been ensured using JWT authentication, JSON string generated will play the role of handshake between layers

-ISD APIs process close to 1300 million rows of data before rendering the summaries.

-30 million rows scanned to render Tracks for 13 weeks

-50k detail records retrieved for Global Profiles

-Dynamic queries were built by joining different data sources to provide detailed analysis across 700+ dimensions and facts

Productivity: Business Leaders can now create their unique data insights on the go rather than asking for it, thereby reducing the time on data preparation and multiple hand-offs.