Gartner Application Innovation & Business Solutions Summit 2024

I had the pleasure of presenting to over 2000 technology leaders at Gartner AIBS 2024. LinkedIn Post Here. It was awesome. VPs, Directors, every variant of CTO/CIO/CEO, you name it- they were there. Many attended the conference with a singular purpose- to explore technical solutions to tangible problems they experienced within their organizations. Some folks were interested in security. Some leaders were concerned with scalability. Others were focused on optimization. Despite their different domains and assorted backgrounds, the common theme was: How can I solve the problems of today, without incurring technical debt for tomorrow?



Figure 1: Preparing to speak on API Platform Maturity.

As a sales/solutions engineer, I took it upon myself to represent what Tyk was and how we could solve the problems of these leaders and executives. However, there was a major problem: hard selling doesn't work when you're dealing with leadership. Decisions made by leaders have major implications across the organizations they represent. Why would these individuals choose our product over any of our competitors? There has to be a compelling reason.

With this in mind, I crafted a message that was simple and relevant. Here's a common problem, and here's a case study on how we solved it. I introduced 3 common design patterns when designing, scaling and optimizing enterprise platforms in regard to API Management.

Letting your Microservices be Microservices.
Leveraging Open Standards.
Treating your Platform like a Product.

I then followed up each pattern with a tangible outcome:

Through microservice delgation and separation of concerns, company X was able to reduce customer latency by 95%.
By leveraging open standards like, company Y was able to achieve API discovery within seconds of deployemnt.
In treating their platform as a first class citizen, company Z reduced their deployment time by a factor of 45x down to 1 day.

If you're wondering what my company does afterwards; excellent! That's the point. Interested leaders directly connected with me after my session to inquire about all the takeaways, while those that weren't interested were probably not looking for API Management to begin with. By establishing relevancy and relatability- decision makers approached me for guidance and solutions, instead of me chasing cold leads and attempting to solve a problem that someone doesn't have. I don't explain what Tyk is until the last 3 slides. Folks don't care about my organization, they care about their outcomes.



Figure 2: Engaging with the audience.

TLDR; No one likes to be sold to for 20 minutes. Time is money, as such, leaders want to find value in the sessions they attend.

If you're interested in my session and slides, you can find them linked here: Best Practices for accelerating your API platform maturity.