Month: October 2014

Thanks to those of you who attended our webinar last week, “The API Love Triangle: Delivering Successful API Programs,” and we hope that you found the session valuable. Now you know that the API love triangle is composed of three key people and that the success of your API program depends on satisfying the needs of each:

• The API Developer, who’s always looking for ways to be more efficient, to get their APIs to market faster, to re-use existing artifacts rather than re-creating things from scratch.

• The Application Developer, who wants to know which APIs are available for use and when they find one that fits their project, how can they get started with it quickly?

• The IT Leader, who wants to make sure that the APIs their team releases are properly secured and managed and that developers use those APIs instead of creating their own.

Companies who identify and expose core capabilities as well-defined, well-managed APIs are essentially making their business “programmable.” For these businesses, APIs act an innovation layer that allows them to quickly capitalize on new market opportunities, engage with their customers in more personalized ways and collaborate more effectively with partners. In essence, APIs are the new fabric enabling agility and fueling competitiveness.

While APIs are enabling strategic initiatives across the business, investment in API programs tends be driven by one of four strategies:

Mobile

The world has officially gone mobile – global mobile traffic now represents 15% of all internet traffic (source: Flurry Analytics, Oct 2013) and Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba now transact 30% of their revenue over mobile devices (that’s $2.5B in mobile commerce revenue in 2013). Today, every application that touches a customer, partner or even employee must be available as a mobile app. And the easiest, most efficient way to serve data from a backend system to a mobile app is through a RESTful API.