Our marketplace Q&A video series talks a lot about the value of a marketplace in driving revenue, helping productize and monetize APIs… but what about what it brings to the organization and its operational processes?
Here, Axway Senior Director of Amplify Platform Marketing William McKinney discusses how an API marketplace helps improve internal efficiency for an organization and offers teams APIs they can trust.
“We get asked that question lot, and I'm going to look at it through the lens of three different audiences and what a Marketplace can do for them.
The first is consumers of APIs. These are your app teams, those people who come to find and use the APIs that they would find in the marketplace. Number one for them is that it's easier to discover and use and put into production those APIs. A proof point here is we had one customer who measured it and said they saw a 3x faster concept to live and a savings of over 15,000$ per API that they were using. So they saw some real efficiency there.
One that I don't have a measurement for but that you hear a lot about in the industry is reducing the cost of duplicating or building an API that you didn't know existed somewhere else. Your cost of APIs would dictate the savings or efficiency that you would get there.”
“The second group I would look at is for the producers of the APIs. What they're really interested in is, ‘can you help me drive adoption of the API that I've created?’ because that helps them increase the value of the initial project that they were creating it for, funding for that project as well as for future projects.
Another thing that really shines through a marketplace approach is to have a common set of metrics that allow you to judge performance across all of the APIs that an organization produces, and it helps make those tough investment decisions where you have to say ‘I'm only going to invest here because I have production, not somewhere else.’
Also, a lot of companies turn to building their own developer portals, and that costs a lot of money. One company is saving a million dollars a year in what they were spending trying to build and support their own custom portal.”
“The third group, the last audience that I look at is the governance and security teams. They are charged with making sure that these APIs are secure and ready to go. They have a lot of automated discovery and validation tools built into our marketplace that can actually check, discover the ones that they didn't know about for instance, and validate them against design and security policies.
What that does is it helps make sure that I have that audit list that says ‘here are all the APIs I have’ and validate that they're secure, which helps reduce the security risk. Can I put a dollar number on that? No, but we all know that it's something that we need to do to protect the business. Those are APIs you can trust.”
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