Many organizations start exploring an API marketplace when they’ve tried and more or less failed to create one themselves. So, they immediately think about the business case in terms of financial savings, with a traditional IT mindset.
Instead, it’s preferable to establish a clear linkage to the digital business initiatives that your company is running, so it becomes a revenue-producing opportunity as opposed to just a cost-savings opportunity. This involves figuring out which initiatives your company is targeting, and how you can expedite them – creating a faster realization of the project and associated revenue streams.
The next step is to demonstrate how digital product adoption will drive that business outcome faster. This means attempting to get developers (whether they're internal or external, depending upon what your initiative is targeting) to find, test, and put in production the API products that are necessary to do that.
Demonstrating how that will help drive the business/revenue outcome is probably the key element of getting the business case started inside your organization.
Next, look at some specific measures like direct or indirect monetization, or potentially internal chargeback, that can be used to help track the realization of the financial outcome. Show your results, not just the number of subscriptions or the amount of API traffic you've achieved.
It is certainly still possible to use cost savings as an argument. We have found some companies are spending up to $1,000,000 a year trying to build their own marketplace, only to realize that it has become an ongoing cost because they have to modify it and tweak the automation, the look and feel, adding new features… that's just not the business that most companies are in.
Want to know more? Watch this 30-minute demo to learn how to get the most out of your APIs with a custom, turnkey enterprise API marketplace.
