Why APIs are De Facto Business Requirements
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The benefits of APIs are becoming more clear in an ever-evolving tech landscape, yet ITDMs still struggle to convince executives and investors to buy into an API-first strategy. Here’s a look at the importance of APIs in a changing world, and how ITDMs can make the business case in order to secure the best API strategy for their organization.
According to Google Cloud’s new “State of the API Economy 2021” report, a majority of IT decision-makers view application programming interfaces, or APIs, as essential ingredients in improved customers experiences, expanded partner engagement, accelerated innovation, and other demands of today’s business environment. This is encouraging: APIs are how software talks to other software, and since much of digital transformation involves combining disparate data and functionality into rich user experiences and process automations, APIs are an essential ingredient in modern business strategies.
What’s less encouraging: the research surveys primarily IT professionals, not business leaders. It’s clear that IT people see the benefits of APIs in the ever-changing tech landscape, but we still hear regular concerns from these same people that they have trouble convincing executives and investors to buy into an API-first strategy. In this article, we’ll look into why they are having these difficulties and some proven ways to successfully position an API strategy not just as a technological solution, but also as a business requirement.
The importance of APIs in a changing world
The rise of APIs has been heavily influenced by the introduction of disruptive new business models and evolving customer preferences that traditional technologies are not positioned to quickly and efficiently address.
For example, traditionally, if your business sold tickets to events, it would build physical ticket booths and maybe a website or first-party mobile app. Today, tickets in many cases aren’t so much a physical thing presented to an usher as a digital code that an usher scans. Likewise, tickets are less-often purchased in person as opposed to online, and reliance on a first-party website can be unnecessarily restrictive. It places the burden on the business to attract customers, whereas surfacing organically in social media, search engine results, and other digital experiences lets the business meet customers where they’re already assembled.
Moreover, as COVID-19 continues to disrupt events throughout the world, many ticket sellers—and most organizations, for that matter—have pivoted to digital-first business interactions as a matter of necessity. All of these changes in the business model, and all of the interacting systems and functionality that underpin them, rely on communication among APIs.
Similarly, today’s banks cannot grow by simply building more branches or hiring more tellers. Instead, they need to make financial information and functionality available when and where customers require it, whether that means via an ATM, a first-party app, or within some other digital experience. Many banks also need to do more than just present this functionality, as customers are increasingly interested in the analytics and insights their spending patterns can yield. Again, all of these interactions—from customers making a purchase within an app to banks applying machine learning in order to offer customers financial insights—are enabled by APIs.
Related: The “State of API Economy 2021” report describes how digital transformation initiatives evolved throughout 2020, as well as where they’re headed in the years to come. Download for free.
When guidance meets resistance
These examples do not illustrate technology that updates the status quo, but rather technology that unlocks business opportunities that transcend the status quo—and that help businesses to thrive even as the status quo fades into irrelevance and obsolescence. APIs are thus not just an IT topic but also important business enablers that should be understood by everyone involved with the enterprise’s investments, from internal stakeholders approving business strategies to external shareholders trying to assess an organization’s trajectory.
The challenge for investor relations is to convey these financial and operational benefits in a way that clearly communicates the need for a new business model rather than refinements to the existing models. It’s essential that IT professionals understand APIs, but it’s also essential for business leaders to understand them too.
This is even trickier given that arguments for API investments are often based on future potential, while arguments for more conservative alternatives are based on past success.
At a high level, the API value proposition is clear: In the past, valuable functionality and data have been encased in systems and applications, making them difficult to scale or leverage for new, evolving use cases. In contrast, APIs make functionality and data infinitely reusable, infinitely scalable, and modular such that APIs can easily be combined for new uses. All of this accrues to richer user experiences and more flexibility than ever for companies to monetize their digital assets, share them with partners, or combine them with assets from third parties.
It’s essential that IT professionals understand APIs, but it’s also essential for business leaders to understand them too.
But investors typically want as much information as possible because their decisions can affect not just productivity and output, but company stock prices and potential future growth. High-level arguments may not be persuasive. The deeper assurances investors crave would normally come from guidance.
Guidance in this context refers to insights based on growth forecasts and customer adoption, but this can be difficult early in market entry. Robust forecasting processes need to be developed to demonstrate the efficacy and value of the API economy, which can be hard to predict: whereas APIs are well understood in some sectors, and especially among digital natives, they are in the early stages of the growth rate in other verticals, making it challenging to forecast developer adoption of a given API. And since there is a shortage of information, trying to use traditional guidance comes with a risk of being wrong and thus of little value to investors.
Related: Set your 2021 API resolutions with these top 2020 posts.
How to deliver a more useful value proposition
While guidance may be premature during the early stages of market entry, investor relations teams still need to convey the full value of an enterprise to investors. To do this, they need a value proposition that emphasizes the intrinsic value of the investment while reinforcing the benefits that can best drive business and stock growth. Considering how large an investment of time, effort, and money transitioning to an API economy can be, it is vital to convey that the benefits are substantial.
A solid value proposition should demonstrate maximum returns, and while this shouldn’t include far-fetched or unobtainable claims, it can include reasonable aspirational visions alongside statistical insights. To craft these aspirational narratives, investor relations teams should look to their organization’s existing business needs and challenges, and then demonstrate how APIs can benefit the organization in these areas. Here are some options that speak to a number of common business requirements:
- Sales channel: API investments are reusable, improve speed to market, enable automated processes and partner onboarding, and can uncover unanticipated opportunities.
- Cost: Businesses can reduce operational costs by using and reusing APIs for innovation and business development, and by using the services native to your partner’s digital surface, you can further reduce innovation costs and risks.
- Earnings: API-enabled digital ecosystems unlock a variety of partner services that leverage the business’s shared data to drive new customer acquisition, new market positions, new transaction volumes, and direct API monetization.
- Risk mitigation: By investing in a credible API, businesses can mitigate downside risks that traditional enterprises can face from market disruptors, industry-wide shifts to digital tools, and inabilities to ingest and analyze growing data sources.
- Intellectual property: Unlike project-driven innovation and customized, point-to-point integration that traps enterprise knowledge in small teams and divisional silos, APIs are reusable and modular, breaking down silos and encouraging intra-organizational collaboration.
- Speed to market: The efficient, repeatable API interface informs improvements to the fulfillment process with consistent access to data from across the organization, which drives solutions that more quickly and efficiently meet customer needs.
- Ethics: APIs offer the flexibility and economical advantages that give organizations the capacity to focus on their brand’s ethical “reason for being” beyond profitability by serving economically marginal and underserved market segments.
- Customer credibility: Organizations can deliver the extended, connected digital experiences that customers expect with the tools and flexibility included with API products.
- Employee retention: Businesses can avoid losing key employees by updating their legacy technologies with APIs, giving employees the opportunity to enhance their skills with modern technologies.
- Corporate strategy: Enterprises that use APIs’ reusable, modular structure and tools are more capable of adapting to rapid structural shifts in customer demand patterns and sectoral changes in the economy.
Whichever of these business challenges a team speaks to, it is imperative that they demonstrate the benefits of APIs, and that once they’ve determined the angle they intend to use, they keep their message consistent. While we’ve seen a number of viable ways to position APIs as a winning strategy, switching among them could make the presentation—and APIs in general—seem insubstantial and unreliable.
This is why it’s key to decide on the most relevant business concerns, and once you’ve tailored your presentation, to make sure that you have message alignment, including buy-in and support from C-level executives. With a strong pitch built around solving existing business concerns and solidarity from relevant stakeholders, you can go into your investor meeting with the confidence to secure the best API strategy for your organization.
Strengthen your pitch with additional insights. Here are five key trends in 2021 for API-first digital transformation.
About the Author: Paul Rohan is a researcher on Open Banking and a Google Cloud solutions consultant. Paul works with banking C-Suites that are examining the impact of the Platform Economy and Digital Ecosystems on financial services industry growth, market structures and governance. Paul is the author of “PSD2 in Plain English” and “Open Banking Strategy Formation”.
Building Unique Customer Experiences with Speed & Scale: Sprinklr & Google Cloud
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Enterprises are increasingly seeking out technologies that help them create unique experiences for customers with speed and at scale. At the same time, customers want flexibility when deciding where to manage their enterprise data, particularly when it comes to business-critical applications.
That’s why I’m thrilled that Sprinklr, the unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform for modern enterprises, has partnered with Google Cloud to accelerate its go-to-market strategy and grow awareness among our joint customers. Sprinklr will work closely with our global salesforce, benefitting from our deep relationships with enterprises that have chosen to build on Google Cloud.
Akin to Google Cloud’s mission to accelerate every organization’s ability to digitally transform their business through data-powered innovation, Sprinklr’s primary objective is to empower the world’s largest and most loved brands to make their customers happier by listening, learning, and taking action through insights. With this strategic partnership now in place, Sprinklr and Google Cloud will go-to-market together with the end-customer as our sole focus.
Traditionally, brands have adopted point solutions to manage segments of the customer journey. In isolation, these may work — but they rarely work collaboratively, even when vendors build “Frankenstacks” of disconnected products. These solutions can’t deliver a 360° view of the customer, and often reinforce departmental silos. All of which creates point-solution chaos.
Sprinklr’s approach is fundamentally different and is the way out of the aforementioned point-solution chaos. As the first platform purpose-built for unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) and trusted by the enterprise, Sprinklr’s industry-leading AI and powerful Care, Marketing, Research, and Engagement solutions enable the world’s top brands to learn about their customers, understand the marketplace, and reach, engage, and serve customers on all channels to drive business growth.
Sprinklr was built from the ground up as a platform-first solution, designed to evolve and grow with the rapid expansion of digital channels and applications. The results? Faster innovation. Stronger performance. And a future-proof strategy for customer engagement on an enterprise scale.
“Sprinklr works with large, global companies that want flexibility when deciding where to manage their enterprise data and consider our platform a business-critical application,” said Doug Balut, Senior Vice President of Global Alliances, Sprinklr. “Giving our customers the opportunity to manage Sprinklr on Google Cloud empowers them to create engaging customer experiences while maintaining the high security, scalability, and performance they need to run their business.”
To learn more about this exciting partnership and the challenges we jointly solve for customers, check out the recent conversation between Google Cloud’s VP of Marketing, Sarah Kennedy, and Sprinklr’s Chief Experience Officer, Grad Conn. Or read the press release on the partnership.
Vizrt’s Story of ‘Lift and Shift’ and Delivering Phenomenal Performance with Google Cloud
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When moving software applications from on-premise hardware to the cloud, it often “just works,” but it’s never guaranteed. This is especially the case for applications that are hardware intensive. This blog post examines what happened when a media company took software for real-time video broadcasts into the cloud. We’ll share how we, Google Cloud, collaborated with media software provider Vizrt to meet the demanding requirements of an eSports broadcaster. Together, we delivered a solution that not only met but exceeded the expected performance from a cloud-based deployment.
Video broadcasting in the cloud
Video broadcasts are a very hardware-intensive workflow. By needing to process and store data streams in near-real-time, broadcasts stress GPU, memory, disk, and CPU. In addition, the performance requirements quickly increase as producers add additional video streams into the mix, such as in this case, an eSports broadcast.
Vizrt’s customer wanted to increase their broadcast production by doubling the amount of camera feeds from 8 to 16, to have a more compelling and elaborate production.
At the heart of the eSports broadcasters’ production was Viz Vectar Plus, Vizrt’s software-based 4K switcher. While the client wanted to move more of its production into the cloud, Viz Vectar Plus was designed initially for on-premise hardware. So, when they tried a straightforward “lift and shift ” to the cloud, it surprised no one that the software didn’t run as well. They turned to Google Cloud and Vizrt to make it run the way they needed it to.
Troubleshooting lift and shift
Initially, we suspected that the issue could be in the design of the cloud deployment, i.e., the configuration of the VM hosting the software. So the focus of our troubleshooting was to find a cloud configuration that 1) made sure the software worked to spec and 2) did so optimally considering costs, robustness, and performance. Furthermore, we wanted to ensure that all components met performance specifications, particularly throughput, IOPS, and network bandwidth, as this was a video media application. Only after we validated the cloud deployment would we ask Vizrt to investigate the code itself. We would:
- Set up a test environment.
- Benchmark the environment.
- Test various configurations.
- Validate that the vendor software was optimally using the configuration.
This high-level methodology is straightforward. However, we approached the details in a particular order, considering we were optimizing for broadcast video. We honed in on the optimal cloud configuration by testing the following elements, prioritized in order of expected impact:
- VM type: The VM type largely dictates the available memory and CPU configurations. However, because this was a VM workflow, we had to pick N1’s. Today, they are the only VM type that can be attached to GPUs, which are practically a requirement for broadcast video.
- Disk type: Video broadcasts require high I/O speeds to handle high-quality video streams. We went from an HDD to a much-faster SSD.
- CPU size: We increased the VM CPU cores from 16 in increments up to 32. Increasing CPU size indeed increased performance, but did not return the level of performance we needed.
- SSD size: We increased the SSD size (and the accompanying higher IOPS and throughput that comes with increasing the size) enabling more simultaneous recordings. Again, this only partially worked.
- Disk count. We noticed read/write problems when the application was reading/writing with a single drive. There are two typical ways to approach this: 1) Separate read/writes tasks among two discs and 2) striping the data streams across discs. Implementing these had improved but marginal improvements in performances.
After our testing, we arrived at the following optimal configuration:
- VM: n1-standard-32 instance w/ 500Gb boot drive
- GPU: 1 T4 GPU
- SSD: 1 persistent disk with 1TB*
* We would later determine that two SSDs for separate read and write operations would be more optimal
This configuration was able to produce between 6 – 12 streams. Compared to the on-premise target of 8 streams, this was about as good but was not the customer’s target of 16. So we would need Vizrt to take the ball from here to optimize the software itself.
Optimizing media applications for cloud
We provided Vizrt our recommended configuration, performance notes, and the following best practices that are generally applicable to cloud-based video workloads:
- Separate read and write operations to two different disks to enable higher performance for both operations.
- A second 1 TB SSD persistent disk can be attached to the VM instance to increase performance.
With this information, Vizrt engineers worked their magic, providing daily patches to test; with each daily iteration the overall solution was found quickly. Not only were they able to meet the broadcaster’s request of 16 feeds, but they were also able to go even further to 44. Over a 5x improvement by optimizing for the cloud!
Teamwork in troubleshooting
Because of the specialized nature of media and entertainment, workflow situations across multiple companies are common as specialized applications hand their work from one to another.
“By working in partnership with Google Cloud we managed to build a system that can scale in ways that probably none of us thought would be possible. This allowed Viz Vectar Plus to run fully in the cloud using NDI and opened up amazing possibilities for making shows,” Dr. Andrew Cross, President R&D, Vizrt Group. “We ended up with great feedback from the customer, who were appreciative of how Google Cloud and Vizrt collaborated on a solution.”
The results speak for themselves: A satisfied customer with over a 5x improvement in results. That’s what we call a good game.
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A Path to Predictable Cloud Costs
Google Cloud’s cost management tools provide the visibility, accountability, control, and intelligence you need so that you can scale your business in the cloud with confidence. Tailored to meet the needs of organizations of all sizes, these tools help reduce complexity and increase the predictability of your cloud costs.
These tools help you gain visibility into your current and forecasted costs, identify cost drivers, and leverage key insights to confidently plan, manage, and optimize your costs with built-in reporting and customizable dashboards.
You can promote a culture of accountability for costs across your organization and better understand your return on cloud investments with flexible options for organizing resources and allocating costs to departments and teams.
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Security in public clouds differs intrinsically from customer-owned infrastructure because there is shared responsibility for security between the customer and the cloud provider.
Cloud Security is different from on-premises security because of the combination of the following:
- Differences in security primitives, visibility, and control points within the infrastructure, products
- and services.
- New cloud-native development methodologies like containerization and DevSecOps.
- The continued velocity and variety of new cloud products and services and how they can be
- consumed.
- Cultural shifts in how organizations deploy, manage, and operate systems.
Here is a Google Cloud Security Foundations Guide to help you develop a security blueprint for your cloud deployments.
Google’s New Climate Innovation Challenge to Fight Energy Crisis and Build Climate Resilience
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At Google, we believe that when it comes to solving a problem as big and urgent as climate change, we get more done when we collaborate. From beekeepers in Germany to urban foresters in Los Angeles, we support the work of nonprofits, scientists, and organizations that are working to mitigate the impact of climate change globally, and increase communities’ resilience to its effects.
To this end, we are proud to launch the Climate Innovation Challenge, which will provide Google Cloud research credits to advance a better understanding of climate resilience and promising solutions to address urgent climate challenges. I’m excited about this launch. We need to get smarter about the inevitable impact of our changing climate and how it will reshape our lives, supply chains, and business. Sustainability is a business-critical agenda, and we need intelligent technologies, leadership, and collaboration to drive industry transformations and reach a net-zero world.
The innovation and scale required to solve the toughest climate challenges will come from technology. At Google Cloud, we’re working across industries to increase climate resilience, applying cloud technology to help solve key challenges in the fight against climate change. Nonprofits, scientists, and organizations will be key in developing new research and innovations that will help us better understand how we can accelerate action on climate.
Through the new program, individual climate researchers in higher education and not-for-profit research organizations can apply for Google Cloud credit grants of up to $100,000 to accelerate their projects with Google’s state-of-the-art, data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) cloud services, from Google Earth Engine (EE) to Google Public Datasets like the one from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). We will work with specialist partners in environmental organizations, agriculture, and carbon reduction to help evaluate proposals and select participants. Our first partner is the National Science Foundation (NSF) AI Institute for Research on Trustworthy AI in Weather, Climate, and Coastal Oceanography (AI2ES). Alongside the cloud credits, we will also provide researchers with access to technical training and mentoring, to help jumpstart their work.
From idea to insight to impact
In 2021, researchers at 500 universities in 47 countries received Google Cloud research credit grants. Others received funding through the Google Cloud Research Innovators Program, which promotes collaboration among a global cohort of scientists and provides them with professional opportunities and technical expertise. Here are some of the Research Innovators who have already advanced their climate research with Google Cloud:
- At CalTech Tapio Schneider and his team built Climate Machine, a next-generation open-source Earth System Model that will integrate more earth and atmospheric data than ever before.
- At UCLA, Bo Zhou uses EE for remote sensor modeling to help bureaus of land management make conservation decisions.
- At the University of New England, James Brinkhoff conducts spatial and temporal analysis for agriculture crop modeling and water use with data from EE.
- At Natural Resources Canada (NRCan), Richard Fernandes is developing the LEAF toolbox to map and assess vegetation with satellite data from EE.
- At the University of Toronto, Yuhong He uses EE to map changes occurring in natural and managed ecosystems systems using remote sensing, machine learning, and ecosystem modelings.
- At UCLA, Henry Houskeeper uses machine learning with EE’s satellite imagery to automate detection of kelp forests.
- At the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Jonghyun Lee conducts numerical modeling for water resources with Google Colab.
- At Technical University in Dublin, Santos Fernández Noguerol runs functions to collect weather data from governmental agencies, then automatically stores them in Google Cloud Storage buckets for future spatial analysis.
- At the University of Colorado at Denver, Farnoush Banaei-Kashani conducts data science projects with applications for Intelligent Transportation and Earth Sciences.
To apply for a Climate Innovation Challenge grant, click here and include “Climate Innovation Challenge” as the first line of your proposal. We will announce additional focus areas, partnerships, and recipients throughout the year. Click here to learn more about Google Cloud sustainability.
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