Juan J. Monroe 
Kong’s 2022 API and Microservices Connectivity Report highlights the vital role of a modern technology stack in driving business innovation and world-class digital experiences.
Despite two years of massive investments in digital transformation to survive the pandemic, Kong’s new report reveals that the pressure to innovate continues to mount for tech leaders. It shows that 90% of technology leaders fear competitive displacement if they fail to keep pace with digital innovation.
Added to this fear is the lack of skills and talent, cited by 40% of survey respondents as a barrier to innovation. Recruiting qualified developers during the Great Resignation is more challenging than ever for organizations in all industries.
The annual survey of senior technology leaders in the United States, Europe and Asia-Pacific assesses how APIs, microservices and modern software architectures enable business agility and compares their use in IT organizations. more than 1,000 employees. The report found that 40% of respondents predict they will fall under or be absorbed by a competitor within three years if digital innovation lags. The majority (78%) predict the same outcome within six years and all within ten years.
“Kong’s latest report provides critical insights into the state of business innovation and technology adoption as we enter this new post-pandemic era,” says Marco Palladino, CTO and Co-Founder of Kong Inc.
“We are in a unique business climate today where almost every minute of our customers’ lives is digitally connected. They expect nothing less than seamless connections and the best possible digital experiences. Businesses must prioritize customer experiences in 2022, starting with investing in the right technology stack and empowering their developer teams to build the apps of the future.”
According to the report, business leaders believe they need to innovate quickly to stay competitive, but the speed of innovation cannot come at the expense of security, performance and reliability. When asked about their top business priorities, most technology leaders cited the need to improve application performance and reliability (48%), improve application security (42%), facilitate the adoption of new technologies to transition to the future (38%) and improve developer efficiency (30%).
As they strive to accomplish their business priorities, technology teams most often struggle with a lack of automation in IT that ties resources to insignificant manual tasks (40%), the complexity of the use of multiple technologies (38%) and reliance on legacy technologies. monolithic technologies and architectures (34%).
More than one in eight CTOs (82%) say their organization has either fully transitioned to fully distributed architectures (microservices, containers, serverless) or currently uses a combination of monolithic and microservices architectures, 38% of ‘among them having fully transitioned to fully distributed software architectures. . As enterprise software architectures become more decoupled, microservices continue to grow. Most teams (64%) are running 20-99 microservices in production, and more than one in five teams (22%) are running 100-499 microservices.
“To manage microservices at scale, technology leaders are increasingly turning to service meshes to complement API gateways by providing reliable, secure, and observable connectivity between services in distributed and cloud-native environments,” says Palladino.
“This year, nearly a third of respondents say they already have service meshes in production. An additional 44% say they have service meshes in deployment, making them a large majority of technology leaders who already have a service mesh services in production or in deployment.”
According to Kong, providing developers with modern technology tools will be an important goal for business leaders in 2022. To meet their business priorities and overcome their IT challenges, technology leaders plan to allocate more to their IT and development budgets :
- 86% of respondents expect their organization’s IT and developer budgets to increase in 2022, with a large majority (72%) expecting it to increase by 25%.
- Another 14% say their IT and development budget will increase by 25-50%.
- 64% of respondents believe their API budgets will increase in 2022, with 32% expecting a big increase of 25% or more.
- In 2021, 36% of teams increased their API budgets by up to 25%, and 20% increased their budgets by 24% or more.
Brad Drysdale, APJ Field Technical Director at Kong Inc, said: “As Australian businesses enter the post-pandemic era, the pressure to innovate will continue to mount and digital transformation will accelerate. The survey suggests that IT departments will be constantly tasked with finding solutions that will enable their organizations to better understand and engage customers, while supporting innovation and reducing time to market.”
Ultimately, he adds, in today’s increasingly digital world where everything is connected, digital experiences are king and customers expect nothing less than seamless experiences.
