Delivering the next-generation of innovative digital weather services

The Met Office’s Director of Information Technology, Charlie Ewen, said: “The Met Office combines the latest science with ground breaking advances in technology and local understanding to deliver operational advantage to our customers. We need to have the necessary knowledge, experience and flexibility to be able to apply our science across business and government to manage risks and opportunities as they arise from our weather. CA API Management will underpin the next-generation of The Met Office services, allowing the organisation to safely share its data and applications with partners, developers, mobile apps and cloud services.”

The Met Office—a Trading Fund within the UK Department for Business Innovation and Skills—is recognised as one of the world’s most accurate forecasters, creating up to 3,000 tailored forecasts and briefings a day. It relies on application programming interfaces (APIs) to bring together the data that powers the organisation’s future cloud and mobile applications. CA API Management enables the Met Office to securely open its data and applications to third parties and share information across organisational boundaries—while maintaining stringent service level agreements across complex, multi-agency business-to-business partner channels and business-to-consumer services.

The result is the rapid innovation and management of new mobile and cloud-based services. For example, The Met Office will be able to launch new mobile app-based services to help the public make more informed decisions about social activities based on the weather conditions. New services will help protect UK armed forces as they plan exercises around the weather, or keep technology safe with space weather forecasts. Moreover, these new mobile services can help the UK and other economies prosper, by advising energy, retail and other sectors of weather that might affect consumer trends, or enabling airlines to reduce costs, and run safely and on schedule.

“This partnership with CA Technologies will help power the next generation of digital services at The Met Office,” says Milko Van Duijl, Senior Vice President, UK and Ireland, CA Technologies. “API management is the glue that connects applications and one of the defining factors that separates the winners from the losers in the application economy. CA API Management will enable The Met Office to monetize its weather and climate data, accelerate mobile services development and grow the organisation.”

CA Technologies worked closely with Computacenter, Europe’s leading independent provider of IT infrastructure services, to deliver the CA API Management solution to the Met Office. The joint solution was selected following a detailed evaluation process conducted by the Met Office.