Introducing ignite Version 7 for Digital Leaders
October 2, 2020
| Reading Time: 3 minutesHere at digitalML, we’ve been working with large enterprises to support them in becoming digital leaders for the last 20 years. A great digital strategy which delivers consistent business-led APIs and Services is key to digital leadership, and to be able to rapidly deliver on digital initiatives and respond to emerging trends. As part of our ongoing commitment to customers and prospects, we have rebuilt our ignite platform to ensure they can do just that.
ignite version 7 provides a unique solution for digital leadership
For large enterprises to scale out their API development efforts and move to what we call API strategy 2.0 (1000s of properly-governed and reusable APIs and Services with an expanded audience), we’ve noticed there’s often a gap which needs to be addressed. This gap is twofold:- A gap in API tooling: slow, manual, and error-prone tools for the API lifecycle upstream of CI/CD and no robust API catalog
- A gap in mindset: APIs need to be business-led and used as a platform for business transformation rather than project by-products
“Large enterprises understand that exposing their core business capabilities and IT functions as a set of APIs and Services is the entry ticket to becoming a digital leader. We knew we had to help make it easier, safer, and faster to create those APIs and Services, and make them available to their entire enterprise in a way that’s understood by everyone, not just developers. That was the main driver behind this radically new iteration of ignite” says Jeremy Sindall, CEO at digitalML.
“ignite has been purpose built to accelerate digital responsiveness by addressing the gap in the API and Service Lifecycle and Catalog as part of a componentized and best of breed architecture our customers are operationalizing” says John Bogard, VP Sales at digitalML.
What exactly does the rebuilt ignite platform offer?
ignite version 7 offers a Holistic API and Service Catalog with support for an Extended API and Service Lifecycle. The terms “holistic” and “extended” are what makes ignite’s offering unique:- Holistic: ALL your digital assets, with APIs and Services abstracted away from code, surrounded by rich metadata, properly organized, and well-governed
- Extended: Focusing on the lifecycle upstream of CI/CD and enabling roles across the enterprise beyond API developers, providing speed and scale for API and Services and expanding them to new audiences e.g. product owners, internal/external partners

This new iteration of the platform leverages a new set of objects to deliver the holistic and extended approaches to an API and Service catalog and lifecycle:
- Design: business-friendly abstracted view of the API or Service – providing a target state of what the API or Service will do once realized, including a set of Functions (abstracted capabilities). Designs are tied to versioned Specifications
- Specification: technical-friendly representation of the API or Service implementation – contains technical details including Methods/Operations and their payload structure, NFRs, Mappings and transformations
- Product Bundle: group of approved-for-reuse Specifications (part or whole) to help deliver new innovative products quickly using existing capabilities
What ignite helps you achieve
ignite version 7 is designed for digital leaders to support you in achieving:Business-led APIs and Services at scale that are:
- Discoverable
- Reliable
- Reusable
- Consistent with API governance rules and technical and industry standards
- Baked-in governance and alignment to an API governance model
- Enablement for multiple roles in the enterprise (API developers, product owners, architects) – supporting top-down and bottom-up API and Service development
- Digital transformation – become a responsive digital enterprise with a set of APIs and Services representing business and technical functions
- Innovation to delight customers – reuse existing capabilities as Product Bundles, dramatically reducing time and cost to market
- IT modernization – core system replacements accelerated safely, reduce technical debt, migrate to the cloud, SOAP to REST, and modernize monoliths to microservices
- Regulation and Compliance – reporting on your whole API and Service landscape to respond to regulator and executive stakeholder requests
- Participation in the API economy and new API ecosystems – quickly and safely bring in external capabilities and simultaneously offer your own in new partnerships
- Industry-specific initiatives:
- Open banking as a digital opportunity instead of a regulatory box-ticking exercise
- Healthcare interoperability and new trends such as telehealth
- Open insurance and emerging business models such as usage-based-insurance (UBI)
