During uncertain times, ecosystem partnerships that leverage APIs have proven to help companies scale and address gaps in their businesses. Apigee customers, like CHAMP Cargosystems, have pursued API-first ecosystem models to enter adjacent markets, create new customer interaction models, and rapidly grow their brand reach and partner ecosystems. As a result of building their API ecosystem, they are transacting 300 million electronic exchanges and 20 million shipments per year.

CHAMP selected Apigee to provide an API platform and developer self-service portal option to all of its SaaS customers. Google Cloud’s Apigee API management platform and portal allows CHAMP and its customers to quickly connect to a variety of backend systems, including in-house, third party apps, marketplace portals and more– thereby accelerating their digitization strategies and opening up new markets through an API ecosystem.

Join this webcast and hear from this leading Enterprise company on how to:

• Identify new revenue sources and markets using an API management platform
• Improve time to market while still complying with all industry requirements
• How to create a proof of concept to grow API adoption throughout your organization
• Align internal business leaders and partners to see the importance of an API-first platform vision

Apigee is committed to continually innovating new capabilities and solutions for our customers, and 2021 saw new product launches, partnerships, and best practices for managing your expanding range of business-critical use cases. Here are some of our favorite stories from 2021. 

Spotting the trends in APIs

Our State of API Economy 2021 Report surveyed over 700 IT leaders globally and identified five key API trends that emerged post-COVID. SaaS and hybrid cloud-based API deployments are increasing with half of all respondents reporting increases in these areas, and AI- and ML-powered API management is also gaining traction, with usage growing 230% year-over-year among Apigee customers. Business metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) and speed-to-market are API users’ preferred way to measure success, and API ecosystems are increasingly innovation drivers, with high-maturity organizations much more likely to focus on building a developer ecosystem or B2B partner ecosystem around their API. Finally, API security and governance is more important than ever, as research showed that increased investment in security and governance was a high priority. Check out the blog to explore these five trends in more detail.

Launching new capabilities with Apigee X

We announced Apigee X, our next-generation platform that brings the powerful scale of Google technologies to Apigee API Management and allows enterprises to power API programs for enhanced scale, security, and automation. Apigee X customers can harness the capabilities of Cloud CDN to maximize the availability and performance of APIs across the globe, deploying across more than two dozen Google Cloud regions and enhancing caching at over 100 locations. Apigee X customers can apply solutions like Cloud Armor web application firewall for enhanced API security and Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM) for authenticating and authorizing access to the Apigee platform. Apigee X also enhances automation by applying Google Cloud’s AI and ML capabilities to historical API metadata to detect anomalies, predict traffic, and ensure compliance. To read more about these features, check out our blogs on Apigee X and Cloud Armor, Apigee X and Cloud CDN, and Apigee X and AI. 

Making new connections with Apigee Integration

Apigee brought our successful API-first approach to integration this year with the release of Apigee Integration. This silo-busting solution lets customers connect existing data and applications, and surface them as easily accessible APIs. Apigee Integration brings together the best of API management and integration into one unified platform so IT teams can scale their operations, improve developer productivity, and increase the speed to market. The platform comes with built-in connectors to Salesforce, Cloud SQL (MySQL, PostgreSQL), Cloud Pub/Sub and BigQuery, with connectors for additional third-party applications and databases on their way. Advanced integration patterns also serve our customers with even more use cases. Check out our launch blog and our Next session video for more details. 

Managing GraphQL APIs with Apigee

The exponential rise in digital services adoption among enterprises now generates petabytes of data every minute. You can harness the power of this data with query languages like GraphQL, accessing the data your app needs with one single request. The growing popularity of GraphQL APIs and their business-critical use cases mean it’s important to manage them with full life cycle capabilities, much like you manage your REST APIs. Last year we compared REST and GraphQL and introduced best practices for managing GraphQL APIs. You can also read our blog announcing Apigee’s support for the management of GraphQL APIs, and our partnership with StepZen to deliver these capabilities. To dive deeper into building GraphQL APIs, check out our Next session video. 

Looking back at the year’s top stories

2021 was the year of the customer, and we published the following stories to show how API management helps enterprises modernize their applications, build digital ecosystems, and generate value for their customers and their own organizations:

• Telco:
  • Leveraging APIs to create value for telco ecosystems 
  • How the MTN Group is expanding its business with APIs
• Retail:
  • Conversational AI with Apigee API Management for enhancing customer experiences
  • Seven-Eleven Japan uses Google Cloud to serve up real-time data for fast business decisions
• Financial services:
  • Arab Bank: Accelerating application innovation with Anthos and Apigee
  • Military Bank: Turns to Apigee to manage its API strategy and deliver digital transformation
• Energy: 
  • How Veolia’s API-first approach is powering sustainable resource management
  • GRTgaz: Calling on Apigee to help internal and external partners access intelligence securely

That’s a wrap for 2021! We hope you have a safe and happy holiday season, and we can’t wait to see what the new year brings for us. Stay tuned in 2022 for product launch announcements, partnerships, tips, and stories of how organizations like yours are innovating with Apigee.

Permodalan Nasional Berhad (PNB) is one of Malaysia’s largest investment institutions with more than RM300 billion ($71 milion) in assets under management. Through our wholly-owned company, Amanah Saham Nasional Berhad (ASNB), we manage 14 funds with a total value of RM235.74 billion ($56.34 million) as of Dec. 31, 2018. 

To expand the range of people who can invest and participate in the economy, our unit trust funds enable the public to invest as little as RM10 ($2.50) into any of our funds. With each investment, unit-holders (a unit-holder is an investor who holds securities of trust) are able to participate in the local and international investment activities managed by PNB and ASNB. They also gain dividends from their investment at the end of the financial year for the funds that they invest in. 

Accelerating access to services with APIs
As chief technology officer for PNB, I lead the retail and asset management technology aspects of the business. My team and I manage the basic IT systems such as email and networks, but also the more exciting and complex IT infrastructures, including investment core systems and data analytics for the unit trust teams.  

In January 2017 (prior to joining PNB), I observed unit holders waiting in a long line just to update their account balances following a dividend announcement. Unit-holders had limited options then: they were required to visit an ASNB branch or one of our agent banks to complete the transaction. When PNB hired me three months later, I was determined to create a self-service balance checker that would reduce our unit-holders’ waiting time. My team first built an application on an Android tablet that communicated to our backend via APIs. Then we constructed a kiosk around this and started our first self-service kiosk. We have built 120 kiosks across Malaysia in six months.

While we made progress in creating new solutions for our unit-holders, we were missing an API management framework to manage our APIs. After extensive market research, we decided on the Apigee API management platform as it was the most suitable platform to build our capabilities for developing and managing APIs. Apigee’s technical capabilities coupled with responsive support from Google Cloud were important factors. Being new to APIs, we value the quick and ready technical support made available to us.  In addition, the secure and flexible system that Apigee offers is critical to us because as a financial institution, security is of paramount importance.

In July 2017, we migrated our retail core system from mainframe base to a modern, cloud-based infrastructure. In August of the same year, a newly developed web portal provided our unit-holders access to their accounts through their mobile devices for the first time. The customer response was very encouraging and uptake has been very high since then. 

The portal uses APIs to enable our 14 million unit-holders to check balances, reinvest, edit their personal information, and access account statements. For now, the portal is only available to unit-holders who pre-register via an in-person onboarding process. We are currently awaiting regulatory direction on electronic Know Your Customer (eKYC) rules that will impact digital onboarding before we can enable access to new unit-holders via their mobile devices.

Creating new channels for financial inclusion
To date, our web portal and APIs have generated approximately RM2 billion (USD500 million) in annual investments. This equates to about five percent of our total yearly investments contributed via the digital platform. While this is encouraging progress, there is much more potential that we can tap into, including the collection and analysis of consumer behavior data. Moving forward, this valuable information will provide insights for us to improve customer experience and fine-tune our offerings. 

A typical bank integration typically takes six months at a high cost. Excluding the governance and compliance approval period, our key APIs can be consumed in under three months, at minimal cost. Banks that use APIs will find ours easy to work with. This simplifies our agent onboarding process. 

APIs enable us to innovate further by expanding our capabilities and reach. We are currently onboarding a few PNB agent banks and we look forward to the possibility to connect to fintech players in Malaysia, especially e-wallet solution providers. API simplify the communications between multiple systems and offer a world of possibilities for our business.

Cloud transformation and the adoption of modern DevOps technology presents both opportunities and challenges for IT compliance functions. With DevOps style application development, the feedback loop for developers and engineers is much tighter than with traditional application development pipelines, enabling speed and agility of application release cycles. While speedy CI/CD is a critical advantage of DevOps, it also shifts compliance left in the development timeline, and therefore puts pressure on the IT risk & compliance organization to modernize their approach to regulatory compliance as well. With the ongoing shift towards cloud technologies and DevOps, modernization of regulatory compliance is no longer optional for an IT compliance function

Compliance modernization is a broad mandate that spans the way the function is governed; the tools, technology, and analytics it uses; the number and nature of its connections to other parts of the business; verifiability and auditability of the controls’ evidence, the expectations assigned to it; and more.

Public cloud technology is becoming a core part of many industries today, and with this comes some potential risks such as cloud misconfigurations exposing intellectual property, loss of physical control of assets, skillset scarcity around cloud based security and compliance. 

Given the constantly changing risk landscape, it is critical that regulations more closely align to address these risks. As regulations and risks evolve, the aim of a modern compliance function is to help an organization stay compliant as it goes through a digital transformation. As organizations go through digital transformation, IT compliance also needs to transform — via upgrading the technology stack, modifying the business processes and most importantly re-skilling people to become cloud aware.

Today we are releasing the new paper by Google Cloud’s Office of the CISO. In the paper we reveal a new approach for modernizing your compliance approach using modern approaches and Google Cloud toolsets. Your team can leverage the paper to add value to enterprises, both by charting a course to the safe use of cloud technology and by reducing risk through the use of the public cloud.

Read the paper “Assuring Compliance in the Cloud.”

Also, review these related resources:

• “Risk Governance of Digital Transformation in the Cloud“ paper
• “Making Compliance Cloud-native” (episode 14) with Zeal Somani
• Google Cloud Compliance resource center
• Our compliance blueprints: PCI DSS on GKE and GCP FedRAMP Blueprint
• Google Cloud security best practices center

The combination of a vital need for IT experts among businesses and a digital skills gap is making lifelong learning increasingly critical. Beyond professional development, learning new skills offers additional rewards from building peer connections to boosting your creativity. That’s why in 2020 Krishna Deepak Nallamilli and I launched KIMO.ai to reimagine how people approach learning, especially in developing markets. Our team is building the artificial intelligence needed to generate individual learning paths through a wide range of quality digital learning content.

Google Cloud and its Startup Program have been instrumental in connecting our team with the tools, people, processes, and best practices to grow our business. 

Existing learning platforms lack engagement

Outside of traditional education settings, massive open online learning courses (MOOCs)—often modeled after university courses—can provide a flexible and affordable way to upskill or reskill. But the vast majority of people who participate in MOOC programs fail to complete courses. Based on our research, the challenge with existing learning platforms is a lack of engagement, primarily caused by limited direction on which skills to learn, whether AI, fintech, blockchain, or other in-demand disciplines.   

We’ve also received feedback that many corporate learning management systems–developed as online training systems to upskill employees–tend to be poorly designed and time-consuming to use. 

Overall, a significant challenge with most existing learning platforms is that they’re generic. For example, suppose you’re interested in learning about AI. In that case, you need AI-related coursework that applies to your industry and the job you want because AI in medicine is vastly different from AI in financial services. Today’s online learning options typically take a one-size-fits-all approach and fail to capture the nuances of what learners really need to get ahead. 

Building a future-proof learning platform 

The commitment to highly personalized, accessible learning inspired KIMO.ai, a platform that we believe is the future of education. Depending on your goals, current skills, location, and other factors, our AI-based platform will identify which coursework (and where to find those classes) to build the skills you need. The more personalized, relevant learning recommendations even take into account people’s preferences for podcasts, MOOCs, books, articles, videos, courses, publications, and more.  

In a mix of cooperation and competition we call “coopetition,” KIMO.ai will regularly recommend courses from other established online learning systems if, based on our automated assessment, it’s the best option for a learner. There’s also the option to access free content only. 

Google cultural alignment fosters trust

Our platform started with one developer exploring NLP models and Google APIs. As we’ve grown our team and launched our beta to 110,000 users in developing markets, we discovered there is a lot of interest in our platform, and we believe we can make a significant impact. In feedback forums, we also learned that we need to focus our efforts on the mobile experience to improve engagement since 99% of the beta testers use mobile devices. 

Beyond our team’s high level of trust in Google Cloud solutions, our team also appreciates the cultural alignment with Google. We value Google’s developer-centric approach and rely on tools like Dataflow for batch data processing and Cloud TPU to reliably run machine learning models with AI services on Google Cloud. We also build all of our deployments on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), which makes it easy to manage all our containerized workloads 

On the front end, Google App Engine makes it easy to deploy apps and experiment, and it integrates seamlessly with Firebase for authentication and more. BigQuery is our serverless data warehouse that efficiently scales to support the millions of articles, videos, and other learning resources we need to analyze to provide the targeted coursework recommendations our learners require.

As we grow our business having a network of trusted advisors is also extremely valuable. By working closely with DoIT International, the 2020 Google Cloud Global Reseller Partner of the Year, our team has access to their cloud, Kubernetes, and machine learning expertise. DoIT has already helped us quickly resolve IT issues and create analytics dashboards that give us insights to continually enhance our services. 

Building for a growing industry

The dynamic edtech market is growing rapidly and estimated to become an $11B industry by 2025. We’re proud to be part of the next wave of personalized education that has the potential to empower people in developing markets and beyond to grow their skills with coursework tailored to their exact needs and how they like to learn. This year, we will deliver our platform to at least 400,000 more people. We’re excited to see how they use it and where it takes them. 

If you want to learn more about how Google Cloud can help your startup, visit our Startup Program application page here to get more information about our program, and sign up for our communications to get a look at our community activities, digital events, special offers, and more.