The API Economy

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API and Innovation

The ability to learn fast and scale easily is key imperative for a dynamic and innovative enterprise to broaden business reach and also to build meaningful business partnerships and opportunities. Hence, the smart use of APIs would allow rapid prototyping by third party developers to externalise insights or functions in a form to integrate quickly into their platform. By empowering third party applications through a platform strategy, this will ultimately lead to greater monetisation of data and facilitate more effective cross-border marketing opportunities.

Enterprises could quickly formulate a prototype based on a rapid feedback loop through faster product life cycle and quicker customer validation. The significant reduction in investments of time and effort to bring a product to market will better allow companies to adapt to market environments and make innovation a continuous learning process.

API and cloud

API entry point focuses on using APIs as the uniform consumption model in a hybrid ecosystem on premise systems and private and public cloud environments. The business mantra is freedom of choice to source any function or data and freedom to deploy solutions to any desired form factor.

The desired outcome is to empower both developers and IT operations. Careful controls need to be placed on the APIs made available and any communication on an open network needs to be secure and appropriately managed. With proper use of APIs in cloud environment, it can make the corporate backend an integral part of your innovation engine. Enterprises with a long history have the advantage of having more assets to expose as APIs. But even for startups, an API driven approach to implementing innovative solutions provides more flexibility in terms of sourcing data and function.

What I foresee is that the use of APIs promotes an omni-channel experience as the data and functions behind the API by definition are remote and can be accessed from any channel or application across the enterprise. This will ultimately frees developers to better design system workflow to improve dramatically on overall customer experience and satisfaction.

The future of mobile revolution with APIs

The bold notion of programming everything into a intelligent system is still emerging but recent developments have pointed towards the need for a more smarter and intuitive approach of integrating people, software, and machines. In the future, what I observe is that smart cars, interactive retail experiences, environmentally friendly buildings, healthcare, utilities, smart cities and manufacturing will certainly witness more innovation with the advent of more intelligent APIs and the influx of smart connected devices and applications.

As the world gets smarter and more instrumented, the need to program your enterprise system capabilities into an integrated platform is inevitable. Embarking on this journey requires developers and business people alike to get experience in what it means to seamlessly program interactions among software, people and devices for better collaboration and user experience.

#cloudcomputing #bigdata #apis