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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)-

    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.

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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)-6

    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.

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.