API marketplace can improve internal efficiency, drive API adoption, and enhance security for your organization.
The Axway video series on getting to the next step of your API journey with an API marketplace 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? In this Q&A video, 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.
Welcome to our What's next series on getting to the next step of your API journey with an API Marketplace. We've talked a lot about the value of a Marketplace in driving revenue and helping to productize and monetize APIs. But what about what it brings to an organization and its own operational processes?
William McKinney, Axway's Senior Director of Amplify Platform Marketing, is the man to answer that question. William, how does an API Marketplace help improve internal efficiency for an organization?
Great question, and we get asked that a lot. I'm going to look at it through the lens of probably 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 available in the marketplace. For them, the primary benefit is that it's easier to discover, use, and put into production those APIs. A proof point here is that one customer measured it and said they saw a three times faster concept-to-live process and a savings of over fifteen thousand dollars per API they were using. They saw some real efficiency there. Another benefit, though I don't have a specific measurement for it, is reducing the cost of duplicating or building an API that might already exist somewhere else. Clearly, the cost of APIs would dictate the savings or efficiency you would get there.
Learn more about API marketplaces and how they support your strategy here.
The second group I would look at is for the producers of the APIs. What they're really interested in is whether you can help them drive adoption of the API they've created. This helps them increase the value of the initial project they were creating it for and securing funding for that project, as well as for future projects. The two things that really help or shine through a Marketplace approach are having a common set of metrics that allow you to judge performance across all the APIs that an organization produces, and making those tough investment decisions based on production data rather than assumptions.
The third group 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 discover the APIs they didn't know about, validate them against design and security policies, and ensure that they are secure. This helps make sure that I have an audit list that says, "Here's all the APIs I have," and validates that they are secure. This helps reduce the security risk. Can I put a dollar number on that? No, but we all know it's something we need to do to protect the business.
APIs you can trust, combined with simplifying and speeding up adoption—absolutely. Well, thanks, William. If you have any other questions about how an API Marketplace can work for you, check out our other videos in this series or get in touch. We're happy to help.
