Introducing Big Data’s cousin Big Services. What you never heard of Big Services? Well Big Services is perhaps a little shy. OK being a little tongue-in-cheek here but services are proliferating very very fast. And the business opportunity is just as big as taming Big Data.

Services are not a new concept; they started as design guidelines to creating reusable services, evolved to Service-Oriented-Architecture (SOA), and the now to API management. What is amazing is that we are in the age of service proliferation – by one measure public services that can be accessed over the internet are doubling every year and that excludes the hundreds of thousands of services inside the enterprise. Add to this the whole new suites of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings it becomes a nightmare to even know how many services are out there.

The sheer volume of services is one reason we could call them “Big Services”, but it is the complexity of the different service interfaces, issues of access and control, monitoring, lifecycle management, governance and access that make them really Big Headache Services!

Consider SalesForce.com which has one API (well that seems easy enough) but has a 1,000 page document describing how to access it (OK not so easy). Workday’s opposite approach of publishing 100’s of API’s with 6 or 7 versions. Each WSDL and schema is unique, with different data types (which many need translation form one API to the next), different dependencies (ordering of API calls make a big difference to the end results) and different security and access requirements.

In order to keep track of these Big Services (Volume and complexity) is no easy task. There is a need for software to help you do this. The software needs to provide repository services and a level of abstraction that ensures you work at solving the business problem at hand and not the complexity of the services call. Naturally the software needs to take care of error handling (like what to do if the service is unavailable), monitoring (like checking if the API is available and the average time per call), lifecycle management (like which version of the service to call) and a host of other service security and dependency checking needs. It comes down to whether you have time to build this software of buy it from a trusted partner.

Big Services are creating Big Opportunities: Online services such as Google, Facebook, Netflix and eBay are handling billions of application programming interface (API) calls per day and some companies are accounting for billions of dollars in revenue per year via API links to their services, according to John Musser, founder of ProgrammableWeb. Enterprises are finding that exposing their systems to the world as services create amazing opportunities, just like Best Buy who allows shopping and fulfillment via their API’s, or the EPA which serves up hundreds of self-service APIs that handle air quality to UV index monitoring, or 7-Eleven who exposed coffee purchase API information to determine the results of the election. It isn’t a matter of if, but a matter of when you expose your services to the self-service world, but if you don’t you will miss this BIG services opportunity. Naturally exposing internal systems as services creates its own set of Big Services Headache – stopping denial-of-service attacks, securing the service, publishing the WSDL and documenting the interfaces, and providing access to these services across the mobile and web world.

How will you take advantage of this Big Services opportunity, and provide your business with Big returns?

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Graphical analysis of changes to an API

72% of the respondents in a recent survey identified API lifecycle management as a critical capability of API management solutions.  The survey, that we conducted last week, included over 50 IT architects, developers and consultants. 80% of the survey respondents also said that they have either exposed APIs or are planning to do so in near future.

As a refresher from an earlier post – API Management Primer – I shared the three basic capabilities of an API management solution – API Portal, API Gateway, and API lifecycle management. When the audience was asked, “Which capabilities do you see as most critical for an API management solution?” (which allowed multiple choices) the responses were as follows:

• API Portal – 61%
• API Gateway – 61%
• API Lifecycle Management – 72%

Why do these IT leaders think that API lifecycle management is important? To understand this better, let’s consider the personas on either side of an API – the consumers and the providers.

As an API consumer, say a client app developer you have concerns such as –

• Can version updates to the API break my application?
• Is my API provider meeting the promised service level agreements (SLA’s)?
• Is the API provider applying adequate resources to power the API reliably?

Whereas as an API provider, say the API product manager, may have concerns about –

• Is the API exposed useful and something that will be adopted as expected?
• Are we meeting our organization’s standards in terms of API quality?
• What is our versioning strategy? When do we retire our APIs?
• How do we make sure we understand the impact of changes before making them?

API lifecycle management helps API providers address these concerns for both themselves and also their customers i.e. the app developers. Without addressing the API Lifecycle, API providers will have problems attracting developers to adopt their APIs. In other words, API lifecycle management is critical to implementing a successful API strategy.

Okay, now here’s some food for thought. Of the respondents interested in implementing APIs, over 80% of them said that they are doing APIs for mostly internal use or for both internal and external use. Only 18% were implementing APIs exclusively for external use.  How do you explain that? Share your thoughts by leaving a comment.

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In fact, I think one of the things that I do best is explain complex ideas in ways others can understand, and so that they realize how the idea is relevant to them.

While technically not a metaphor, I really like the idea of comparing API’s to Excel formulas in the context of the “everyone learning to code” trend. It came up in yesterday’s API Management Demystified webinar.

Many businesses run complex models in Excel. In fact, Excel was, in many ways responsible for the JP Morgan Chase “London Whale” that cost them billions. (In my opinion, Excel wasn’t responsible, rather it was a lack of governance that allowed people using Excel to fail in a very big way, but that’s a-whole-other conversation.) James Kwak has a smart article about the importance of Excel to business, and why running a business on Excel is such a mess. James’ key difficulties with Excel:

• There’s no governance or auditing.
• There’s no ability to test if the spreadsheet is working (and importantly, if it’s still working).
• There’s a very low barrier to entry (anyone can create one).

Another thing I’m really good at is being lazy. I abhor inefficiency, and simply refuse to do things twice when they can be automated with just a little extra effort. It’s not just about efficiency, by the way. It’s about art.

When I started my career, I was writing a boatload of proposals for network integration solutions. I totally tricked out Excel. Doing so saved me hours off each proposal, possibly hours a day.

My proposals were art*. Why? I was able to focus on proposal content and the deseign because I had automated so much of the crap-work. Plus, my proposals were simply better because they’d be more correct (I embedded error checking in the spreadsheet each time I made a mistake, so I’d make the mistake only once).

I can’t be the only lazy person out there.

Things have changed since the early 90′s. Today, people are using their mobile devices for everything. In fact, just this morning I took a picture of my wife, my baby, and my iPhone as we were having a family moment! (OK, I’m odd.)

Not everyone is going to want to start their own company. Some lazy people have corporate jobs. And, they will want to write their own applications instead of the spreadsheets that the earlier generation-of-lazy would write.

And, that’s where API’s come in.

API’s will make corporate resources (processes, events, & data) available to lazy people all over corporate America to make things more efficient.

The only thing is, just because “everyone knows how to code” doesn’t mean “everyone understands programming”.

The same challenges that James points out in his article apply with an even greater degree to software.

Why to a greater degree? Because software that uses API’s will be everywhere, not just “locked in Excel”.

That’s where API Management comes in to play.

Companies that want to capture the innovation going on in the mobile & API markets, or that want to take advantage of their most motivated employees (the lazy ones), are going to have to create an environment where problems can be solved with software using digital corporate assets. The only way to do this successfully is to deploy an infrastructure supporting these efforts that delivers governance, lifecycle management, and self-service testing & support.

* I still have some in storage along with the personal letters of thanks from customers.

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API Management Demystified

Several weeks ago, I wrote a Primer on API management and I have received tons of great feedback and questions from blog readers and colleagues in the field. It’s great to see people are finding API management especially relevant to their mobile and cloud strategy.  My colleague David Bressler (has written several posts on this topic – see Enterprise API Trifecta) and has experience addressing API management with both IT and business leaders. So we’ve decided to team up in an effort to summarize our experiences on a webinar called, ‘API Management Demystified’.

In this webinar, we will cover why APIs are important to your business, how APIs present new challenges, and the question I’ve gotten many times, what are the essential API management capabilities? During the webinar, we will share how customers have had success getting their API projects started on the right foot. Please join us for live Q &A at the end of the webinar to get your questions answered and comments addressed. And don’t worry, we’ll be emailing all registrants with the recording so even if you can’t make it, be sure to register. If you’d like to submit a question in advance of the webinar, please leave a comment on the blog and we’ll be sure to answer your question during the webinar. We look forward to seeing you there!

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But why API’s and why now?

Technically an API (Application Programming Interface) simply defines an immutable contract between API consumers and providers. It is the implementation of the API that actually packages data and/or business logic. What’s changed in the last couple of years is the number of target devices for deploying applications. The options are multiplying rapidly, be it web, smartphones, tablets, laptops, or even cars. By 2020, there would be no less than 10 billion mobile devices in the world.

Which leads to the expectation of  a user experience that now widely varies by the user’s needs, preferred devices, and context. It is becoming increasingly difficult for enterprise IT to serve the needs of such a diverse mix of users. That’s where APIs step in. APIs allow any app development shop out there to create apps that can serve the needs of a specific segment of users. It is a “win-win-win” situation – Users get what they want, app developers monetize the apps they build and enterprise IT gets to serve its diverse end users.

In fact, some of the most popular apps, came out of developer hack-a-thons where developers combined APIs from multiple companies to create a highly innovative app. Without publicly available API’s, this would not have been possible. (See another post in this blog, the API trifecta around the topic of innovation and APIs). APIs therefore, provide a distribution channel for a company’s products and services. Increasingly we are seeing evidence of this in industries across the board but especially in sectors such as media, retail, travel and government. As an IT leader if you decide to provision your APIs externally, you would naturally want to manage them.

So what does that mean in terms of the capabilities you need? 

At the highest level, an API management solution needs to include a –

• Developer Portal for developers to discover APIs, understand usage and sign up for access
• API Gateway that secures and mediates the traffic between your APIs and its consumers
• API Lifecycle Management to manage the process of designing, developing, deploying, versioning and retiring APIs

Of course, the above capabilities may be delivered as-a-service or on-premise or some combination.

If you are with me so far, you are probably now asking -

So how’s API management different from SOA Governance?

There’s quite a bit of confusion out there. You are not alone. That’s because there is significant overlap between the capabilities that are needed to manage APIs and govern an SOA. The key difference lies in the objectives of these two initiatives. API management is concerned with managing external APIs where consumers are unknown. SOA Governance, on the other hand, is about managing services with known consumers.  Note that even for SOA the consumers don’t have to be internal. They could be your business partners who are external but known in advance. (And to be sure, external = outside your firewall.) This distinction leads to design and deployment choices that at times masquerade as differences, adding to the confusion. For instance, REST based APIs are much more popular than SOAP ones, but that’s only because REST services are a lot easier to consume.

Is this helpful in furthering your understanding of API management? Let me know what else you would like to know about API Management.

P.S. What’s common between cowboys, railroads and API management? Stumped? See what my colleague wrote a few months ago on this subject.

The post What is API Management – A Brief Primer appeared first on Reality Check.

Why couldn’t there be a “corporate instagram-like success”?

Why can’t a corporate enterprise service bus excite imagination the way Twitter has?

Often its the people way down in the trenches that have great ideas about improvements to the business. Other times, it’s just someone that has an itch to scratch. That’s why, give me five minutes in a non-busy store here in NYC and I’m behind the counter talking to the barrista/copy-guy/pharmacist about the systems they use to get their job done.

I believe there are ideas everywhere. And, if I were a CIO I’d make sure anyone in the company could innovate the same way they can in the consumer space.

Take the following example from my own career.

A long, long time ago, in an economy far, far away I was a pre-sales engineer at a network integrator. We were about 15 people; I supported 3 or 4 sales people. We I did the bill of materials for our proposals in Excel. All layout, pricing, and deal profitability analysis was done in Excel at the same time. To make my job easier, and to dramatically improve my throughput and accuracy, I customized the heck out of Excel. And, I did it in a way that made it easy for others to help me – like printing the right formats (for the customer, for management), examining deal-profitability metrics, and even some error correction to catch missing components. This is what young, energetic people who are full of ideas do. And, if we don’t enable them to do it at work, they’ll do it on the side and start their own business.

Fast-forward 20 years, and here we are. Instead of visual basic we have API‘s to let you do anything and online programming classes for marketing to teach you how. In fact, there are even small companies (here and here) who require all employees to learn to code.

Let’s take a closer look at API trends that could help enterprises unlock the energy of its employees to dramatically improve innovation.

Segmenting the API Market

When it comes to API’s and API management, there are two personas to think about, and three use cases to address.

The 2 personas are:

1. People who provide API’s (providers)
2. People who consume API’s (consumers)

The 3 use cases are:

1. Internal API usage
2. B2B API usage
3. External API usage

Segmenting in this way helps IT focus on how they speak to the different values and opportunities that each combination presents. It’s helps us to understand how API trends apply to us, and how to stay focused on adding value to the needs of enterprise IT.

In the context of *providing* API’s to an *internal* audience, here are 3 key behaviors IT can copy from the consumer market in order to capture innovation.

#1 API Management

One way to understand the trend around API’s is to take the perspective that API’s are the new website. If this is the case, why would it be any different inside the organization than it is outside? Today companies give employees pages full of information, tomorrow it will be API’s to data, events, and processes. Doing so presents challenges. Challenges to compliance. Challenges to support. Challenges around governance.

API Management provides a solution to these challenges and more. It provides a way to integrate IT more positively with the youngest generation in the workplace. A generation that has grown up digitally, and by its very nature has different needs from IT than generations prior.

#2 Code Academies

If you’re giving your employees API’s to important and useful corporate information via API, why not teach them to use it properly? And, if you think it’s just IT that’s learning to code, you’re wrong. The millennial generation is a familiar with technology as you are with a typewriter. They want a reason to learn to code, give them one or they’ll find their own reasons (and start their own companies on the side).

There’s a lot of energy in the business of teaching people to code. You may think they won’t be any good, that marketing people don’t have the skills or experience to write good apps. You’d be correct. But, I’d point out all the crappy websites that exist, and share my belief that quality will get better over time, and won’t be something that stops people from trying (or believing they have the right to contribute in this way). Bring these technologies in-house, train your own employees, and then set them loose…

#3 Hackathons & Coding Challenges

The third leg of the API trifecta are group coding efforts. Hackathons and coding challenges are used by the startup community and government to get people to contribute ideas in a constructive and collaborative fashion.

If you’re a large organization, why not have some internal programs to capture ideas and turn them into something the business can use? You’d be taking the people with ideas, and giving them a forum to use the API’s you’ve created and the learning-to-program training they’ve completed. You’d be pointing them at real business problems and seeing the solutions they create. Winners in the consumer space might win an award or a gift card. Or, they might enjoy the recognition that comes from having your app promoted on the NYC Subway or Apple App Store.

Why can’t an internal winner win executive sponsorship for their idea, to see if really can have an impact to the business? Isn’t this a great way to both bubble up ideas from the bottom, involve the generation who feels they have the right to participate, and develop your next generation of business leaders all the at same time?

The Trifecta

There you go, the Enterprise API Trifecta: 3 elements IT can incorporate from the consumer space today in order to create a more innovative and collaborative IT environment.

For additional insight into how IT can create a platform for internal innovation using a SOA infrastructure (including customer stories) why not watch this webinar on SOA Innovation that I recorded in November 2012.

The Enterprise API Trifecta is an excerpt from a thought piece I’m working on tentatively titled: The Consumerization of Integration: 10 Best Practices Enterprise IT Should Steal from the Consumer Space to Capture Innovation & Build a Mobile Strategy. Drop me a line if you’d like to hear more.

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