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eBay case study: Breaking down data silos with APIs for the enterprise


WEBWIRE

The vast majority of organizations today are undertaking digital transformation initiatives, but most are stalled by integration challenges. Our 2019 Connectivity Benchmark Report found that disconnected data silos are creating business challenges for more than 83% of IT decision makers. Just imagine what would be possible if organizations learned to integrate these information silos to create flexible enterprise systems that exchange information in real-time. 

A data-driven business

eBay’s mission is to provide a global online marketplace where practically anyone can trade practically anything, enabling economic opportunity around the world. The company supports approximately 180 million active users and employees around 10,000 people. eBay’s entire business model depends on seamless, scalable transactions. Every day, the platform facilitates communication between buyers and sellers, platform users and customer support, third-party fulfillment centers and shipping services, and more. As a result, it is crucial that all of their data is readily accessible and easily manipulated — whether it needs to be transferred, merged, aggregated, enriched, summarized, or filtered.

Before partnering with MuleSoft, eBay’s data resided in various locations and formats across their technology stack, not easily accessible to all key stakeholders. In an attempt to keep up with the pace of the business, their IT teams had built one-off integrations between applications, using point-to-point custom code. This integration architecture forms “tightly coupled” connections between components, resulting in redundant work and making it difficult to replace or introduce new infrastructure components. To continue innovating at speed, eBay needed a scalable and flexible approach to integration. Optimize your API program with MuleSoft’s C4E

APIs for the enterprise

With MuleSoft, eBay’s data services team began to design, build and deploy productized APIs for the enterprise. Instead of developing APIs and integrations across multiple different standards and tools, they took a unified approach to API management and integration by consolidating on MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform. Business processes were packaged up and published as APIs, complete with best practices and templates so that federated teams could use them without calling on central IT for help. 

By aligning behind the same common standards, eBay strengthened communication between development teams and enabled reuse of existing IT assets, ultimately accelerating their project delivery timeline (see table https://www.mulesoft.com/press-center/trends/APIs-for-the-enterprise-unlock-siloed-data)

In its first project with MuleSoft, eBay’s central IT team eBay built out a generic project request and approval framework (pulling data from systems like Workday, Concur and Sailpoint) to manage their constant stream of requests from Line of Business (LoB) users. They have since reused the APIs from the first project to further enable LoB teams to self serve and move to the cloud. As they continue to build out an application network using productized APIs, eBay will unlock more and more data for future projects .

To see how other customers are harnessing the power of API-led connectivity, register for an upcoming MuleSoft CONNECT. MuleSoft CONNECT is coming to Chicago, New York, Sydney and London this Fall!


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