Why API Economy is the backbone of the smart enterprise
[Poster available at the end of this story]
According to Tech Target, the API economy refers to the set of business models and practices designed around the use of APIs in today’s digital economy. It involves the exposure of an organization digital services and assets through application programming interfaces (APIs) in a controlled way.
In the past years, I worked on many projects that involved APIs, both from a consumer side or from a publisher side. I totally agree with the above Tech Target definition, and with Gartner’s statement that I find spot-on:
The API economy is an enabler for turning a business or organization into a platform
In this article, I will be sharing 4 reasons why I consider API Economy as the backbone of the smart Enterprise.
1. BETTER TIME TO MARKET WITH SELF SERVICE PORTAL
APIs will allow different internal platforms to connect and share information with each others. These systems will also carry out diverse types of tasks. When you add on top of this an api portal, where teams can self-serve to generate connections that will fit their needs, you get in another level of agility and projects acceleration.
2. BUSINESS ENABLEMENT
APIs are also referred as VPI (Value Proposition Interface) because they are very often at the center of value creation. Having in place a strong API capability will generate new business use cases at ease.
Let’s take 2 examples of what you can achieve using APIs.
Example 1: Develop a service that suggests a dress code for a Saturday dinner at a restaurant.
Combining APIs from OpenWeather, Google Places and Twilio with your own service intelligence can solve this.
Example 2: Develop a service that offers a travel package that combines car rental, flights and hotel
Combining APIs from Rental Cars, Amadeus and DerbySoft HPA with your own service intelligence can solve this.
3. COMMUNITY GROWTH
An API economy within your enterprise will foster better ways of working.
It will above all, create communities around key topics and domains.
This is a great way of organically breaking silos within the enterprise, as colleagues will naturally work together on end-to-end use cases and deliver them using APIs.
4. OPEN ECOSYSTEM
An enterprise with a solid and open API platform will be able to better innovate: provide data and services to external parties, while at the same time, consume data and services from the outside. The smart enterprise will have its place in the digital open ecosystem.
Imagine the potential of combining your assets and services, with the ones from Twitch, Shopify Plus, Mailchimp, Planet Booking and many more api-driven tech players!
To recap. APIs are here to better leverage data and services, enable new business use case and activate innovation. APIs are technical elements that clearly bring added business value to any enterprise.
Feel free to download the poster below and to drop me a note for any comment, question or feedback!
