Interviewed by Susan Sharer, EVP, FedHealthIT
During a recent catch-up with Robert Wickham, Director API Solutions, North America Public Sector & Canada at CA Technologies, we learned more about this company that is focused on helping program innovators embrace the application economy.
What category does your product fall into: Cyber? Interoperability? Open Source? Big Data? Telehealth? BPM? Or something else not on this list?
We fall into a number of categories because of the way we approach things: Interoperability, Cloud, cybersecurity, with a bit of big data mixed in. We leverage API and microservice based approaches to enable secure data interoperability. We’re helping clients prepare systems, networks and infrastructures to take advantage of the next evolution in technology.
What are the top 2 Federal Health Agencies you are currently working with?
We have deep relationships with HHS, and VA. Our API gateway ensures secure data interoperability between a number of Healthcare Agencies and allows them to validate data in areas from IoT sensors, to being part of identity proofing steps and enforcing access policies to accounts.
What are the trends you are seeing in your space and where is the market going?
[su_pullquote align=”right”]Getting access to any and all data and making it useful is the next evolution in business transformation.[/su_pullquote]I keep hearing new phases such as “data is the new oil”, or “data is the new currency”. Getting access to any and all data and making it useful is the next evolution in business transformation. One of the most commonly cited objectives of CIO’s is to get data to resonate across the business.
There is a big push to multi-factor authentication for everything and this security needs to be applied to machine based interactions. Also, there needs to be full transparency later to check and report on authentications. The API gateway can be a critical component in MFA enabling app to app access.
What advice would you give to the system integrators and/or partners that hope to drive new opportunities in this space?
We’re seeing a lot of merger and acquisition activity within the system integrator space. This is an opportunity to modernize existing systems of Agencies with new concepts emerging from industry that can reduce the level of effort. In our space, it is important to enable partners to differentiate themselves through the use our tools to better support clients. With integrators, the goal is to help them to develop high quality applications in a very fast and agile manner using tools that can interoperate within existing ecosystems. For integrators that can mean developing ecosystems of capabilities to grow their specific lines of business. One example of this is the use of our Live API Creator that can automatically build a catalog of potential API’s from data sources. The developer can choose the ones that are most relevant and configure the last 10% of the API to match the specific needs. In this case, an integrator whose developer uses this tool will be able to develop far more innovative API’s in a fraction of the time required by a competitor. From there, they can securely publish, monitor, and manage its use, driving further insight out of the data and directly impacting the customer’s mission, modernization, and success.
About CA: We use a number of techniques to achieve our clients’ goals but one that we specialize in is the creation of a modern software factory that uses Agile concepts, DevOps, and builds security into each phase of the software development lifecycle. In the API Management business unit, we’re focused on machine based interoperability and security and automating the speed and security of developing applications, Cloud based services, and IoT.
In the application economy, where data is becoming the most important asset and security is paramount, the challenge with data capture and making it useful is creating the way for your system to interact with the outside world. Our API gateway is a strategy that provides this solution safely. The concept of a gateway is traditionally firewalls and identity prevention, and so on. Our gateway sits on the edge of the network, allowing the system to accept API calls under several hundred protocols and then it stops it, pulls out what is needed, repackages it into a policy approved system call within your network, then receives the response and repackages it into the requestor’s format to send it back. It acts as a firewall but the ability to unpack and repackage the data can remove the burden of having to upgrade legacy systems to allow things to work with the outside world.
