Dreamforce 2019: Powering digital transformation with APIs and integration

The ultimate goal of nearly every digital transformation initiative is to please the modern customer. Recent advances in technology have ushered in a new generation of empowered customers who are active across multiple digital channels, increasingly aware of the myriad of choices available to them, and relentless in their pursuit of the most rewarding experiences. But all too often, the data and processes that must coalesce to provide these rewarding customer experiences are highly fragmented and difficult to connect. That’s where integration comes in. At Dreamforce 2019, MuleSoft was joined onstage by a few star customers to demonstrate how APIs and integration are fueling the most successful digital transformation initiatives. Here’s a peek at what attendees heard:

BMW unlocks data to create connected experiences

Rene Wies, VP of Group IT, Sales, and Marketing at BMW, emphasized the importance of providing a seamless experience throughout the entire customer journey — from browsing for cars online, to visiting a BMW dealership, to test driving the car, to purchasing the car, to everything that comes with car ownership like service, repairs, and maintenance.

“We wanted to take the same experience of the perfection and joy of driving from behind the steering wheel to outside the car,” said Wies. “In order to do that, we had to link up a whole lot of touchpoints in the customer journey.”

Wies explained that with Anypoint Platform, BMW has interconnected all of its business-critical systems to give employees — including salespeople, technicians, and customer associates — access to the right data at every touchpoint.

Ashley Stewart empowers everyone to be an Integration Trailblazer

When Eileen Rizzo, SVP of IT at Ashley Stewart, first joined her company, the IT team was still writing lots of custom code: “I realized that in order for us to deliver real value to the business, we needed to transform the way we were building and developing,” Rizzo explained. “So we signed up for Anypoint Platform, and we really invested in our team through MuleSoft training.”

With a team of Integration Trailblazers, Rizzo says that IT is delivering projects 2-3 times faster than before, and adding a new data component into an integration now takes less than a day.

HSBC innovates through its API ecosystem

Prakash Sethuraman, Chief Architect of Digital Technologies at HSBC, said that the bank has “reached out the olive branch” to external providers, forging new partnerships to create new joint features like an overview of customer spending across all their bank accounts.

To streamline internal operations and make innovation easier, HSBC had already turned its core banking products — including credit cards, mortgages, and payments — into APIs in an application network that could easily be assembled to create new experiences.

The next step was to expose key global banking capabilities out to partners to create new streams of revenue. HSBC is leveraging API Community Manager built on Salesforce Community Cloud and Salesforce Service Cloud to deliver an internal and external developer portal that will span more than 30 markets and three global businesses.

Check out more customer use cases here.