How mature is the API market?
When meeting players on the API market, and in particular API management vendors, one interesting question appears soon: how mature is the API market in France?
Said otherwise: how much evangelization effort is still needed to make people understand the full whereabouts of APIs?
This is a tricky question, because the APIs market is like an iceberg: there are the public APIs that everyone can see, but the rest (the bulk) are hidden, reserved for companies' internal needs or within a closed ecosystem of chosen partners. See Developing The API Mindset for a detailed description and considerations for each nature of API.
Obviously, some industries are more advanced than others. Many internet startups design their services with an "API first" approach, and most of them heavily consume third-party APIs; some industries have been early adopters, like the media industry, where digital has entailed such a sweeping change that automating and industrializing the delivery of content and related metadata in a programmatic way has become an absolute necessity.
So should we jump to the conclusion that the market for new APIs lies (only) with industries that have been up to now relatively protected from the digital challenge ?
Well, no. Our experience is that you should not draw such a conclusion.
Indeed, embracing APIs and getting the most of them is a long and serious journey, involving strategy, technology and marketing.
We must not be halted by executives who tell us "APIs? Yes, we already have all we need, we have web services". The point here is obviously not about the merits of such or such stack of technologies, it is about strategy and business.
API is an ancient concept
It happens that "API" is an ancient concept, that has matured a lot to become what it is today, with streamlined technologies, full scaled features and business cases. But let's face it: there is a huge gap between the best-of-breed APIs and some of the APIs we see in operation on the market.
So here are a few questions we ask executives to understand where we stand exactly :
- let's discuss about your strategy and see how APIs fit in
- what API use-cases have you chosen to go for? Are you expecting an immediate ROI, or are you betting on long run capabilities or upsides?
- in your view, how can APIs facilitate the adoption of the digital culture inside your organisation?
- let's have a look at your developers portal (yes, also for internal APIs!)
- how do you market your API (internally, to partners, to the community of developers if relevant). What feedback do you have from the users of your APIs?
- is your API security scheme consistent with your company's security policy?
- do you have a roadmap for your API? Do you plan to open your API to the community of developers? Have you thought of how your data could be mashed-up with others' into compelling apps?
Time for sleeves up: digital in the making
Engaging a discussion on those topics is very stimulating, and more often than not leads to exciting new ideas.
Yes, API evangelization is bearing its fruits, but now is the time to turn our sleeves up and implement and expose state-of-the-art APIs.
This is what at Wildnode we like most : "digital in the making ».
Tech Journalist and Editor
9yhey Regis, thanks for referencing our Developing the API Mindset ebook! Looks like Wildnode is doing some cool stuff