Unlocking Digital Transformations with API Management Platform

Business undertake Digital transformation with the intent to create new Business models and build an ecosystem of partner and customer. These transformation initiatives help business to automate, simplify, integrate and expose systems and services to internal, external partners in a secure and standardized way, resulting in streamlined business operations and effective monetization of the IT assets.

Emergence of API Culture and Management Platforms as key Component of Digital Transformation

With recent digital evolution, most business are leveraging APIs to expose digital assets and capabilities as consumable and reusable services and API Management Platforms for the management of these APIs.

Though digital transformation has been among enterprise top business imperatives for few years now, and API Managements platforms has been growing rapidly from the early 2010s the most recent market analysis, concluded the market is still fluid with the emergence of new players, acquisitions and market leaders reinventing themselves. And with recent pandemic drastically redefining the ways of operation, we further see the emerging trends in API Management Platform space. 

Key Trends in APIM Space

1.      AI and ML Powered Solution Gaining Traction

API Gateway, the core component of the API management platform is used to minimize the attack surface of the exposed services by presenting a single point of entry for all of consumable business services. With the mass adoption of APIs and accelerated digital transformations, organizations are now turning towards AI and ML powered API management solutions as AI/ML can effectively help them to identify traffic anomaly and bolster their security capabilities. As a result, vendors are now trying to go beyond the de-facto security offerings like OAuth, SAML, two-way TLS, API Keys and encryption support, and out of the box security policies.

2.      Analytics and Visibility Becoming Differentiated Offering

As enterprise evolve by offering APIs as products with differentiated monetization policies for their partners and customers, the ability to define KPIs, measure and publish them is becoming key requirement. Also, the products support for in-depth traffic analysis based on varied parameters like API key, request origin, their ability to offer custom data views from logs and debug messages and visibility into traditional metrics focused on API performance as well as ones related to business impact, including Net Promoter Score (NPS) are seen as differentiated offering.

Role is indisputable, but right selection is key

It is a foregone conclusion that API Management Platform will play a vital role in organizations which are undertaking the transformation journey as they help them to manage the growing number of integrations and share them internally and with external users, all without compromising performance and security. But it is quite a challenge to get the apt product which has the right mix of features and benefits as the market demands and product offering continue to evolve.  At one end of the spectrum, there are feature-rich platforms, such as Google Apigee, Mulesoft, and WS02. At the other end there are lean products targeting modern enterprise with eye on operational cost such as Tyk and Kong. Then there are products, which shines with their complementary integration suites like Red Hat 3scale, IBM API Connect, Dell Boomi, Workato, Axway AMPLIFY.  The final platform decision is not only going to be based on technical parameters like deployment topologies they offer or portals features which facilitate easy user enrollments, API discovery or the ability to experiment with API, but based on number of business parameters as well, like existing IT investments, future needs, priorities, risk appetite of business to experiment with niche and evolving platforms and budgets.