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Five Reasons a Business Needs APIs (and an API Driven Strategy)

  • Five Reasons a Business Needs APIs (and an API Driven Strategy)-

    Powering new business models

    Pure-play API companies such as Twilio and Sendgrid have shown APIs can in fact be products in their own right – becoming the core offering for the company or a large business unit. While this does not apply to all companies, enabling and delivering a valuable service to third-party developers and partners has clear revenue potential. Furthermore, if successful, this strategy has the potential to become an element of core infrastructure for its users and hence create a strong, loyal following of partners, savvy developers experienced in the APIs, and an ecosystem of third-party tools.

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Five Reasons a Business Needs APIs (and an API Driven Strategy)

  • 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7
  • Five Reasons a Business Needs APIs (and an API Driven Strategy)-5

    Powering new business models

    Pure-play API companies such as Twilio and Sendgrid have shown APIs can in fact be products in their own right – becoming the core offering for the company or a large business unit. While this does not apply to all companies, enabling and delivering a valuable service to third-party developers and partners has clear revenue potential. Furthermore, if successful, this strategy has the potential to become an element of core infrastructure for its users and hence create a strong, loyal following of partners, savvy developers experienced in the APIs, and an ecosystem of third-party tools.

APIs have become one of the hot topics on the corporate IT agenda in recent months – both in terms of individual companies launching new APIs such as Jawbone and Honeywell and in the more general rise of the API economy. The boom is evident as ProgrammableWeb has reached the milestone of 10,000 APIs published.

Despite this attention, however, it's often hard to reconcile what is being written vs. what APIs actually deliver to the business. In other words – who is using APIs and what are they using them for? To help answer this, 3Scale, a leading API management solutions provider, has developed the top five reasons a business needs APIs.