Imagine a small-scale enterprise or even a startup that has designed a breakthrough app to solve a niche business problem. An additional feature that would complete this app is to add a payment gateway to help its users complete monetary transactions.

Now take a step back and again picture an established enterprise with years of experience in creating banking products and services that already cater to the needs of payment gateways for all its customers.

The startup need not create the code for this gateway from scratch but rather use the APIs from the larger enterprise, forming a symbiotic association with each other.

This type of relationship needn’t be restricted to two different enterprises but may also be a possibility in a business conglomerate with multiple business units. The units can leverage exposed APIs within an organization to create better products and services by merely working in collaboration with each other rather than existing in complete siloes.

Welcome to an API-driven economy, which simply refers to values exchanges between consumers and providers through APIs. Take Uber, for example. This simple mobile app disrupted the entire transportation industry by combining public APIs with proprietary processes. This ride-sharing company started by integrating the API of Google Maps without having to build its own mapping system.

Today, API discussions are not restricted to the technical world of developers and publishers. Digital transformation is adopted at a rapid pace, and APIs have become the glue binding all systems together. All organizations, irrespective of their size or scale, wishing to jump onto this new wave of digital transformation, need to understand and implement a robust API strategy.

However, an API-first strategy also comes with its set of challenges, as stated below:

1. Vendor Management – 40% of organizations have three or more API management vendors, making it extremely difficult to manage expectations.
2. Developer Community Feedback – Businesses tend to ignore this feedback due to less visibility, although it is essential to implementing a robust API strategy.
3. Use and Re-use of APIs – API Publishers struggle to make their APIs discoverable in API portals. The portals need to have the right categorization, grouping, and documentation associated. They also need to have the necessary controls to ensure that duplicates of APIs aren’t created.
4. Siloed Partner ecosystem – Organizations still restrict their interaction with partners from their respective domains. There is a need to widen the partner networks to leverage the full potential of APIs.
5. Gauging Market Needs – API Publishers and consumers also need to understand the market needs and feedback, measure the performance of their work and improve upon their products.
6. Portals lacking user-centricity – The developer and publisher portals available today are struggling to attract each other, causing a rift between both communities.

An API marketplace can help businesses overcome these challenges, resulting in successful implementations of Digital strategies.

A marketplace that brings API buyers and sellers together in one platform can be referred to as an API marketplace. This platform allows API providers (developers or businesses) to list their APIs while buyers (other developers) can view the APIs and buy them.

So, what differentiates these marketplaces from the API portals that are currently being used?

A simple answer would be user-centricity and design. An API marketplace should be arguably as attractive as any publicly available product website or feature page catering to all the developers and publishers. The following features will result in an API marketplace being your one-stop shop for all API needs.

1. Single Pane View – API marketplace aggregates many API providers and showcases their products in a single panel. It should be optimized, attractive, organized and categorized for end-user adoption.
2. Community Building – Fosters an environment wherein developers can find relevant APIs, rate them, clarify questions and view use cases for all APIS
3. Easy Documentation – The publishers and developers also have access to all documentation related to APIs that can be readily integrated.
4. Data Analytics – Once the marketplace is up and running, you can keep tabs on a variety of analytics like Operational API Analytics, engagement metrics, and platform-based analytics.
5. Revenue Generation – It also helps developers who are constantly searching for resourceful APIs to have lots of options and pricing plans to choose from. You can also set up subscription tiers for monetization in your API marketplace.

APIs and API Management are cornerstones to achieving Digital Innovations in the years to come, and we see certain trends taking shape:

• 65% of companies are accelerating investment in digital transformation due to Covid-19. For organizations wishing to achieve digital transformation, API management is the most promising route forward.
• According to a Postman research, 67% of respondents reported embracing an API-first philosophy this year.
• With limited developer resources, low-code/no-code tools allow citizen developers to create and update APIs without software developer involvement. Hence as API adoption continues to accelerate across industries, low code/no-code features will become increasingly important.

These trends seem to be just the tip of the iceberg. As the industry pivots in a new direction, we need API marketplaces to make their consumption and production user-friendly.

Brillio can enable customers to achieve digital transformation initiatives by helping them define a robust API strategy and designing a future roadmap. With our extensive offerings and capabilities in the API Management space, we are well placed to ride this new wave and build a marketplace that can truly cater to their API needs.

References:

https://www.akana.com/blog/api-marketplace

https://wso2.com/whitepapers/building-an-api-strategy-using-an-enterprise-api-marketplace/

https://www.infoq.com/articles/effective-api-marketplace/