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”.
Creation of Go applications on Google Cloud Made Easy
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Go is the world’s leading programming language for cloud-based development, used by millions of developers to build and scale their cloud applications and business-critical cloud infrastructure. Whether it’s building CLIs, web applications, or cloud and network services, developers find Go easy to learn, easy to maintain, and packed with useful features such as built in concurrency and a robust standard library.
And now, getting started with Go on Google Cloud is a little bit easier. Following Go’s recent announcement of gonew, an experimental tool for instantiating new projects in Go from predefined templates, Google Cloud is releasing four templates for gonew that developers can use to bootstrap their Go applications across several Google Cloud products. This includes common use cases such as creating a simple HTTP handler Cloud Function, subscribing to a Cloud Pub/Sub topic, or creating an HTTP Server on Cloud Run.
Google Cloud Go templates
- httpfn: A basic HTTP handler (Cloud Function)
- pubsubfn: A function that is subscribed to a PubSub topic handling a Cloud Event (Cloud Function)
- microservice: An HTTP server that can can be deployed to a serverless runtime (Cloud Run)
- taskhandler: An basic app that handles tasks from requests (App Engine)
Let’s get started
- Make sure you have Go installed on your machine, if not you need to download/install from here .
- Start by installing gonew using go install:
$ go install golang.org/x/tools/cmd/gonew@latest
To generate a basic HTTP Handler Cloud Function, instantiate the existing httpfn template by running gonew in your new project’s parent directory. As of now, gonew’s syntax expects two arguments: first, the path to the template you wish to invoke, and second, the module name of the project you are creating. For example:$ gonew github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/go-templates/functions/httpfn yourdomain.com/httpfn - Deploy this new go module to Cloud Functions by following the steps listed here, you can also try this in the Cloud Shell editor.
What’s next?
We have big plans for Go on Google Cloud, with several new enhancements on our roadmap. In the meantime, please try out these new templates, deploy them to Google Cloud using the instructions provided and let us know how we can make them better. Please use this to report any issues.
AI Features in Apigee X Helps Build and Manage APIs at Scale
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APIs are the backbone of digital transformation. Via APIs, you can securely share data and functionality with developers both inside and outside of your organizational boundaries, letting you build applications faster, seamlessly connect and interact with partners, and drive new business revenue.
Because APIs encompass business-critical information, any downtime or performance degradation can lead to significant loss in revenue, customers, and brand value. Therefore, there’s mounting pressure on operations teams to ensure that APIs are always available and performing as expected. If the APIs go down, so too do the services that fuel customer experiences and on which the organization relies for collaboration and business processes.
However, as you build and scale your API programs, it becomes practically impossible for API operators to manually monitor and manage all your APIs. To help, we brought the power of industry-leading AI and ML technologies to API operations via Apigee X, a major release of our API management platform. Apigee X seamlessly weaves together Google Cloud’s expertise in AI, security and networking to help you efficiently build and manage APIs at scale.
Put your API data into action
Apigee applies machine learning to your API metadata and provides you the required tools that simplify various aspects of API operations. A great example of AI for APIs is anomaly detection:
- AI-powered rules trigger alerts based on a set of predefined conditions that are determined by applying Google’s industry-leading machine learning models to your historical API data.
- Auto-thresholds adjust the monitoring criteria of your APIs and set them to pattern-based values.
- Reduce overhead results because operators don’t have to manually monitor anomalies or adjust the monitoring thresholds on APIs.
“By applying AI and ML models to our historical API data, these advanced features are able to alert us about scenarios we haven’t thought of. Such automation capabilities significantly reduce our upfront efforts. And from a security perspective, the actionable insights help us ensure that our proxies are exposed only over secure HTTPs ports and adhere to compliance requirements. We’re also able to closely monitor user activity and quickly pull out reports during audits.” – Adam Brancato, Sr. Manager, Global Technology and Security at Citrix
As our customers scale their API programs, they find it extremely useful to harness AI-powered capabilities. In our recent State of the API Economy 2021 report, we found a 230% increase in enterprises’ use of anomaly detection, bot protection, and security analytics features.
To learn more about Apigee X, and see AI and machine learning in action, check out this video, and to try Apigee X for free, click here.
Woolaroo App and Vision AI are Helping Users Explore Native Languages
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One of the most vibrant elements of culture is the use of native languages and the time-honored tradition of storytelling. Anthropologists and linguists have been vocal on the role that language plays in the preservation of culture and how it contributes to the appreciation of heritage.
Unfortunately, of the more than 7,000 languages that are spoken around the globe, nearly 3,000 are at risk of disappearing. In fact, it’s estimated that on average a language becomes extinct every fourteen days. Google Arts & Culture realized that with some creative technology and partnering with language organisations, we could help create an interactive and educational tool to help promote them.
Enter Woolaroo, an open-source photo-translation platform powered by machine learning and image recognition. The application was built on Google Cloud to encourage users to explore endangered languages around the world. Users are able to take a picture of an object in real-time, and the application returns the word in its native language, along with its pronunciation.
Woolaroo was created with the philosophy that learning languages is greatly enhanced through engagement and context. By seeing an object in its environment, it’s easier to retain the information and then use it more naturally in conversation.
With the help of Googlers, Woolaroo was launched in 10 languages, including Calabrian Greek, Louisiana Creole, Maori and Yiddish. During the conception stage of the app, teams from Partner Innovation and Google Arts & Culture put out an open call to the rest of Google to see what lesser-known languages our employees spoke. They then worked with the individuals that responded to develop dictionaries that were reviewed by partner institutions to ensure translations were correct and consistent.
Woolaroo uses Google Cloud Vision API, which derives insights from images using AutoML or pre-trained models to quickly classify images into millions of predefined categories. This makes AI accessible and useful to more people as AutoML automates the training of these machine learning models.
Our team at Google Arts & Culture creates immersive experiences for people to learn about art, history, culture and more. We are committed to supporting the preservation of heritage and cultural landmarks – including spoken language – through the use of modern technology. The magic of Woolaroo is that it is open source, which means any person or organisation can use it to build something for their own endangered language. To learn about the efforts Google Arts & Culture is involved in, download the Google Arts & Culture app or visit our blog.
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One of the great opportunities of cloud technology is the ability to combine and integrate different tools, services, and platforms. But, the question of which cloud tools and platforms to use—and how to ensure they work together seamlessly and securely still persists.
According to recent research, 82 percent of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy, running applications in an average of 1.5 public clouds and 1.7 private clouds; and IDC predicts increasing adoption of hybrid cloud architectures. As a result, many large organizations already depend on mixed networks composed of multiple cloud service providers, third-party cloud platform vendors, and on-premises systems.
So, how do organizations implement a successful multi-cloud strategy while deriving the full benefits of the cloud?
What enterprises need is an open-source strategy and consistent governance that will help companies use multi-clouds to compete in the digital world. Download this Harvard Business Review whitepaper to know more.
A CIO’s Guide to the Cloud: Hybrid and Human Solutions to Avoid Trade-offs
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What do CIOs and CTOs deliver for the company? If you said “technology,” that’s just the beginning. According to their research, McKinsey found that 85% of CIOs and CTOs interviewed in the spring of 2019 said they were essential for at least two of the three most common CEO priorities—revenue acceleration, improved agility and time to market, and cost reduction.
IT modernization – including migrating to the cloud – is key to business growth and agility. Yet, according to a recent McKinsey study, 80% of CIOs report that regardless of their level of cloud migration, they still haven’t reached their projected agility and business benefits. Sometimes, this is because of issues like training and skills gaps in the IT workforce. Surprisingly often though, the barrier to reaching the goals is based on trade-offs that CIOs themselves feel they must make to strike a balance between the perfect and the possible.
But what if you could have it all without the trade-offs? As Will Grannis, Managing Director of the CTO Office at Google, and Arul Elumalai, Partner at McKinsey & Company discussed in our recent digital conference, many of the compromises CIOs make can be avoided with new technology, modern architectures and by encouraging a transformation mindset across the business. In interviews, CIOs explained how they’ve leveraged the best of the cloud without compromising on security, agility, and flexibility. Here’s how these leaders avoid three of the top perceived trade-offs—both with technology and by transforming their operating model.
Trade-off #1: Developer agility vs. control and governance
Moving to the cloud offers new opportunities for speed, but 69% of organizations indicate that stringent security guidelines and code review processes can slow developers significantly. One CISO of a multinational company mentioned that cloud development was so fast that they had to institute manual checks on their developers’ code. So much for agility.
To overcome this trade-off and maintain both speed and security, some respondents found success in DevOps, hiring security-experienced talent and introducing automation for security and quality. Building in security into the CI/CD pipeline and increasing automation don’t just eliminate the tradeoff, they result in higher quality and faster innovation.
At Google Cloud, we’ve also observed that customers with strong DevOps practices have increased speed-to-market and product/service quality. From our own journey, we’ve learned seven critical lessons essential to adopting a DevOps model, ranging from taking up small projects and embracing open source to building an overall DevOps culture.
Trade-off #2: Single-vendor benefits vs. freedom from lock-in
CIOs perceive benefits to using the fewest number of clouds, specifically avoiding introducing multiple systems that require their teams to develop and maintain multiple skillsets. Unfortunately, 83% of the CIOs interviewed said that while they would prefer fewer clouds, the potential financial and technical lock-in drives them to multiple providers.
Successful CIOs said that they can avoid lock-in pitfalls not just with contractual guardrails and executive and board education, but with evolving hybrid cloud technologies that provide additional choices. Hybrid cloud platforms based on containers can further mitigate the risk of using a single cloud vendor. The key to successful hybrid architectures is the infrastructure abstraction and portability that containers create for them, enabling disparate environments to work together.
This notion has been at the heart of our strategy at Google Cloud with Anthos, which provides an abstraction layer and an application modernization platform for hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Enterprises can use Anthos to modernize how they develop, secure, and operate hybrid-cloud environments and enable consistency across cloud environments.
Trade-off #3: Best-of-breed tools vs. standardization and familiarity
Optimizing tool chains for different environments can improve productivity, but many CIOs believe that this means reduced functionality and tools. While 77% of CIOs said they had to standardize to the lowest common denominator, some have found a better solution. Rather than giving up the languages, libraries, and frameworks that their teams prefer, effective leaders said that they found success by investing in training programs to upscale talent and adopting new open and vendor-agnostic solutions. Architectures that are based on open-source components have been the keys that helped remove this tradeoff, and eliminate the notion of a lowest common denominator.
This is why we have built Anthos on open-source components like Kubernetes, Istio and Knative. Anthos gives your business the choice you need. With the ability to create code that works in most environments using the tools, languages, and systems you prefer, you can do more without major changes to how you work.
Regardless of your current cloud adoption level, check out “Unlock business acceleration in a hybrid cloud world” to discover more about McKinsey’s findings, including how CIOs drive agility, methods to make trade-offs unnecessary, and how to prepare your team for the cloud. Then, stay tuned for subsequent posts that take a closer look at how hybrid solutions and strategies can help CIOs drive a transformation mindset across the business—without compromising on security, agility, and flexibility.
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