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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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.

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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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Driving innovation at enterprises has always been a tremendous challenge.  There’s always hard to extend legacy systems, disparate systems to be integrated and monolithic applications to be changed. Doing so is painstaking and time consuming work, but the business side of the house is nevertheless focused on seeing immediate return on investments. Exacerbating this situation is the fact that there’s one too many ‘best practices’ to go around making it confusing as to what approach is expected to work for you and your organization.

But is there any getting away from this situation?

The stark reality is that in an uncertain global economy, constant innovation is central for businesses that want to survive and stay competitive. Add to the mix the game changing innovation in personal technology that we have witnessed in the last couple of years. There’s an app for virtually everything, smartphones and tablets are ubiquitous and we are increasingly consuming services in the cloud that has transformed entire industries.

Businesses today are looking at exposing internal capabilities and data via APIs as a new distribution channel for their products and services. They want to adopt the latest capabilities quickly with cloud-based solutions for marketing, sales and human resources that are seamlessly integrated with core enterprise systems. And they want new mobile apps supported on both official and personal devices to empower employees and reach their customers.

What does this mean to you, as an IT leader who is responsible for driving innovation?

It’s time for a comprehensive application strategy that can meet today’s demands for innovation and is well positioned to meet ongoing demands in the future. That means your entire application landscape should be built on a foundation that exposes the needed business capabilities to build new applications and allows rapid changes in the future. Taking a service-oriented approach (SOA) to your application architecture is the foundation for a sustainable innovative future. Customers in various industries have taken this approach with great success, here are just a few examples.

• Avnet is one of the world’s largest distributors of electronic components with over $25B in annual revenue and 100,000 customers. Over 70 acquisitions in 20 years that required integrating disparate applications running on multiple platforms created the urgency for IT to innovate. By adopting SOA along with end-to-end governance, they increased reuse going from 800 services to 111 interfaces, invoked 6M times a month! Avnet not only reduced development time by 55% but also significantly accelerated integration of new acquisitions.
• Endo Pharmaceuticals creates high-value branded products that meet the unmet needs of patients along care pathways for pain, urology, oncology and endocrinology. Their challenge was to integrate a cloud-based HR solution – Workday and synchronize data for 1500 employees to no less than 18 downstream systems. The company used an SOA infrastructure to integrate with Workday API using Pub Sub model for consistent distribution of data. They also established a governance framework to track data from system to system and guarantee security of personal information – critical for compliance reasons and key to success of the entire project. In the process, Endo reduced the time to complete the business process by 70% while increasing accuracy and lowering costs.
• BOK Financial Corporation  is a $27 billion regional financial services company based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. BOKF, NA has full-service banks located in eight states while BOSC, Inc., the broker/dealer subsidiary, provides brokerage services in 10 states. They started on their SOA journey in 2007 establishing an SOA governance committee along the way. In 2010, when they were asked to build a mobile solution with a full set of customer features and a high degree of quality, and speed. They completed the entire project in just four months crediting their architectural design for allowing quick development.

What was common in the approach among these very different companies?

These companies indeed had the right building blocks to establish an SOA and accelerate innovation. These building blocks are software tools to build an SOA infrastructure such that they 

• Are easy to adapt and build upon based on open standards to readily integrate with your existing systems and offer easy customization to suit your specific needs.
• Integrate tightly to eliminate duplicate work, keeping various development and deployment artifacts in sync, increasing automation which helps speed up time-to-value.
• Enable strong governance for service visibility, monitoring and metrics, and for ensuring security and other quality-of-service (QoS) requirements.
• Come with world-class expertise that provides methodology and advice customized for your organization and objectives to ensure successful implementation.

These innovative companies are hardly isolated examples. With the right building blocks,  you and your organization can also un-suck excel at innovation!  Just get the right building blocks! Check out this interesting Infographic on this topic.

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