Accelerate Digital Transformation With API Management
Technology & Innovation is a topic of conversation in every enterprise IT department. With the democratization
of enterprise applications, the idea that organizations can leverage powerful business innovation by partnering
outside the organization is gaining a lot of traction.
While activities like sharing data with partners and providing functionality, and other digital assets is a part
of enterprise workflows, customer experiences are now increasingly demanding rich combinations of software from
multiple sources, multiple parties & ecosystems.
These approaches require centralized access management and assembly of all the data, the requirements,
functionality, logging, auditing and data enhancements. While doing that also requires that the organization can
supplement its internal capabilities and drive innovation.
APIs Can Drive Connected Participation
APIs provide standardized interfaces, methods, tools & functionality for building and connecting modern
applications. API’s mask all the backend complexity and presents an enterprise with the ability to secure,
monitor, and manage digital assets, data and application functionality that it shares with both internal and
external consumers.
By using existing value and data in new ways, API’s make the data and functionality easy for internal developers
to re-use much of the functionality and accelerates innovation, thus increasing developer productivity &
decreasing turn-around times.
Innovation outside the organization can be leveraged by opening valuable assets for external innovators such as
corporate partners or independent developers who can securely access and leverage the provided functionality &
data.
IT departments are already busy managing and running the current environment and will be stretched to create all
the required elements & technologies with the rigor needed to create compelling digital experiences using the
most advanced strategies.
Customer behaviors and preferences are changing very rapidly and will always continue to do so. Such Ecosystem
strategies can help alleviate such roadblocks and allow the businesses to focus on what they’re best at thus
relying on outside partners that can seamlessly help translate those untapped competencies and bring them out
into new markets and new use cases.
Want To Understand How API’s Can Help Leverage Innovation ?
Let’s take a small example to illustrate the situation.
A retail business can very well develop a homegrown machine learning application and meet consumer needs that
demand such experiences, however will the ability implement that functionality on time in a manner and as
quickly as customers may demand related experiences ?
Consumer demands are now requiring voice interfaces & provide greater personalized recommendations via customer
service chatbots. Such competencies require organizations to be able to develop cutting-edge machine learning
solutions, they do not all have expertise readily available. Thus, external innovators or partner companies &
agencies can extend their ready-made solutions into this space.
Such Innovation that focuses on the bottom line leverages the synergies from the software ecosystem in which the
retailer and the AI both are involved.
Since the launch of Kubernetes (K8s) in 2014, there has been a massive shift towards decomposing systems into
microservices and API’s. However there is also a huge risk of deploying unmanageable numbers of microservices
which might introduce technology sprawl and cause security nightmares.
API Gateways & APIs are therefore now rapidly becoming a new focus for IT departments. These APIs can power both
internal applications, developer apps, partner apps etc..,
API Gateway’s are the key enablers for security, abstraction, discovery, and consumption of underlying resources
that can reside in a myriad number of clouds, on-prem or any combination thereof.
API gateways and API management platforms help maintain the internal agility of IT systems and architectures
while providing stability via an API contract to allow developers and their applications restricted access per
business needs for innovation.
