Amplify Enterprise Marketplace is the solution to the challenges you were introduced to in a previous module. It also helps you leverage the opportunities provided by the drivers.
You need a well-designed, and well-developed, API Marketplace to promote your API products through digital channels. Amplify Enterprise Marketplace is an efficient and consumer friendly solution to get your own marketplace, enabling you to start sharing, and monetizing, your APIs.
An API Marketplace is where you collect and expose APIs that you want others to discover and use to interface with your business data and processes.
Audiences can range from internal developers in different business units, to trusted partners, and to third party developers looking to leverage your data in new ways you have never thought of.
You might immediately start visualizing this as an API portal. While you already have one of those, there are major differences between an API portal and an API marketplace.
For example,
- An API portal focuses on the APIs as a technical interface, directly linked with a specific vendor's gateway
- An API portal predominantly targets the internal use cases and audience
API Marketplace, on the other hand, focuses on API products as business interfaces for internal AND external use cases and audiences.
Marketplaces have features for API product managers to curate products from multiple lower-level APIs, provided through multiple API gateways.
Marketplaces also offer discovery, subscription, security, and monetization options to drive revenue directly, or indirectly, from the API usage
As APIs become a major channel for doing business, most of the enterprises must deal with API sprawl.
API sprawl is what happens when APIs are hard to find, leading to similar APIs existing.
From a consumer standpoint, the API must be easy to find. Otherwise, API developers will default to rebuilding it themselves, causing sprawl. This can include IT leaders, developers, and line of business users. Duplication can be a waste of time, money, and resources.
APIs can be hosted on multiple gateways provided by different vendors. Administrative and user interfaces on those gateways have unique workflows, user interfaces, and other specific details of communicating with each gateway. Amplify Enterprise Marketplace allows you to aggregate these APIs from multiple gateways, and present them to consumers in a uniform, easy to use, easy to find, easy to understand way.
Finally, developers are looking for an efficient and easy way to work with APIs. They don't want to waste their time looking for proper documentation or test clients. Amplify Enterprise Marketplace allows API providers to embed all required documentation for business and IT users with the API, improving search, discovery, and consumption.
One of the capabilities that enables Amplify Enterprise Marketplace to deliver this targeted user experience is Product Foundry. It enables companies to build API Products by linking multiple assets, to create a business capability that can be reused and monetized.
Think of an asset as one or more APIs, grouped together because they are similar in nature, but run on different API Gateways, OR because they are complimentary.
Each product can be constructed by selecting one or more assets from across your distributed platforms, grouping them by domain or target audience, and adding documentation, describing the value and engagement instructions of the product.
To control proper access and usage of the products, a provider will create subscription plans. Ready to be used products are published to the Marketplace for consumption.
Digital programs are successful only when consumers, mostly developers, have access to the correct API, with easy subscription and usage models. To achieve these goals, a new role, API Product Manager, was introduced in many companies. The main purpose of this new role is to compose attractive API offerings with a seamless “test and subscribe” experience.
Working with business leaders, API Product Managers curate, aggregate, tag, categorize, and version available assets into meaningful packages. Later, these are bundled into one or more API products.
To address a specific group of consumers, the API product manager bundles one or more assets that address a specific use case.
API Product Managers also attach proper subscription packages and documentation to make this offering self-contained and easy to use in a self-driven fashion.
Amplify Enterprise Marketplace enables API providers to implement and apply a full life cycle to assets and products.
It becomes a routine and trivial task to introduce new products, or even to deprecate and archive them, as business goals change.
Products have value only if consumers adopt them. So, you need an efficient way to take your products to the market and engage with your consumers.
To achieve this, you need a Marketplace that will let consumers explore your product catalog and subscribe to the products they need.
An API provider maintains a single catalog of all digital assets and can create multiple storefront interfaces to target different groups of consumers.
Amplify Enterprise Marketplace allows you to design, and present, multiple Marketplaces. Each of them can be rebranded to match your company’s identity. And each marketplace URL is white labeled, removing any trace that those Marketplaces are maintained on the Amplify Platform.
Another way to increase adoption of your service is to have your products organized and classified by different dimensions so that consumers can quickly discover the products which best address their needs.
Amplify Enterprise marketplace also makes it easy to enable subscription and secret management. This enables developers to quickly test the services.
Features like reviews, comments, and ratings, help you to create a thriving consumer community, with whom you can engage and drive growth.
Amplify Enterprise Marketplace solves one of the most common pain points with APIs, search and discovery. It provides a way to tag and categorize API assets and products for API providers.
It also provides a very flexible system to add or remove categories and tags.
This makes it easy for API providers to assign assets and products into different categories, according to business needs.
As a result, searching becomes a trivial task. Marketplace users find what they need with ease.
It is important that APIs must also be protected, and their consumption controlled. These requirements are met by Amplify Enterprise Marketplace with authentication and subscriptions, making it easy to subscribe to API products you have interest in.
The Marketplace provides a clear overview of the subscription plans, status of your request, and next steps.
Consumers can be notified about, and then view the status of, all their subscriptions.
Amplify Enterprise Marketplace uses the concept of logical entities to organize your subscriptions and access credentials, like API keys.
Amplify Enterprise Marketplace supports indirect and direct monetization.
For indirect monetization, Amplify Enterprise Marketplace lets you track and determine internal and external consumption of a specific API or API Product.
For direct monetization, companies can implement through Amplify Enterprise Marketplace, a charge back for internal consumers, if needed. And payment processing for external consumers, if needed.
Success of your digital initiatives requires full visibility into how your consumers use your APIs. The Metrics may include the volume of API calls, percentage of failed calls, latency, and security issues. Each of these metrics provides a way to analyze and improve your business.
The Amplify Platform allows you to slice and dice many API metrics using Business Insights. You can determine, for example, if your new product or marketing campaign achieves its target, or, you can identify a negative trend with some of your APIs well ahead of when it affects your consumers.
