It's often hard to reconcile what is being written vs. what APIs actually deliver to a business. Here are the top five reasons a business needs APIs.
Driving Internal Innovation
Last but not least, large companies continuously need to innovate – creating new internal and customer-facing systems. APIs offer the key to providing the agility needed to do this – Jeff Bezos famously enforced all software in the company to interact only via APIs from 2004 onwards, and this move is widely credited as key to Amazon's ability to later enter disparate new businesses such as AWS computing services. APIs are key in providing packaged, accessible interfaces to systems all across an organization and reducing the friction in creating new, cross-organizational systems.