The biggest damage the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has created, outside the human cost, is the paralysis of economies worldwide. It has forced many countries into lockdown mode, almost wholly restricting people’s mobility. As the situation continues, it may result in companies in specific sectors like retail, hospitality and airlines going out of business. It is imperative for many companies to come up with new strategies to reach their customer base. This is where technology and APIs can help.
Traditional businesses need to figure out a mechanism to deliver value to their customers while staying relevant and competitive in a pandemic affected economy. For example, what can restaurant owners do to reach their customers when they can no longer walk through the door? With limited mobility, people will use the web or mobile devices to access services, and today delivering value over the Internet has become the only choice. Restaurants that don’t transition to digital strategies may cease to exist.
Taking a fine dining restaurant to the web
Going digital is easier said than done. Let’s take a fine dining restaurant as an example. Customers usually visit such places due to prestige and aren’t particularly concerned about the lack of online food delivery services. Such organisations typically have no customer-facing IT applications except the website. As we adapt to our circumstances, the restaurant owner has to:
- Build a mobile app to display the menu and let customers place orders
- Modify the website to accept orders online
- Build a backend application to process orders and integrate with existing in-house systems
- Hire delivery staff, undertake and track deliveries and manage the fleet
So, the restaurant must invest in IT and delivery, neither of which they are familiar with. It involves a lot of work, and many other traditional businesses that do not have an online presence will face similar issues. The most common problems are lack of expertise in digital transformation, shortage of skilled staff, complexity, slow time to market, and most importantly, budget.
How business ecosystems can help
But what if businesses could go digital while still doing what they are good at?
Handling IT is not a core competency of a restaurant. Also maintaining a fleet of vehicles and staff to do doorstep deliveries is, for many, a new concept. What if the restaurant could partner with a business whose core competency is IT? For example, it could partner with a mobile or web app provider that lists the restaurant to users allowing them to place orders. In this way, the restaurant doesn’t need to worry about building web/mobile applications to reach its customers, and they’ll continue to receive orders. Likewise, the restaurant could partner with a delivery service to offload the order fulfilment burden.
The point is that businesses should not attempt to go digital unless they have the right capacity to do so. They should try to build partner ecosystems to complement the skills they lack. Not only will this help businesses to survive the hard times ahead, but it also boosts the economy by opening new revenue streams. Their key to success is building a close-knit ecosystem.
This is where APIs can help. Businesses that partner together need to communicate frequently and effectively. Taking the above example, the mobile app provider should let the restaurant know about an order being placed. The restaurant also needs to tell the delivery service when an order is ready for delivery. The ideal way is to do this is via APIs.
How APIs and API Management works
APIs are a set of functions and procedures that help build applications to access features or data of a system. API management involves a technology platform that allows the business to expose and manage these APIs. In other words, API management enables you to provide a proxy for existing services. It also exposes any newly created APIs in a standard, compliant, and consistent manner to users.
API management typically has multiple components and feature sets. It includes:
- An API gateway as the API run time and policy enforcement point
- A security component for API key management
- An API developer portal acting as a catalogue of APIs providing a centralised location for application developers to discover, subscribe to and test APIs
An API publisher provides the ability to design APIs from backend services, and API analytics provide a snapshot of API usage.
A case in point
- Business level agreements (SLA) and API design: Take the restaurant example above. All parties need to agree on what business interfaces they will need from each other. At this stage, businesses and technical stakeholders should collaborate to produce an API contract that documents and governs what interfaces are exposed, the expected request and response formats, and how each interface will be secured. The output of this step would be an API design document.
- API implementation: Each business must implement interfaces (APIs) as per the agreement they have made. For that, an API management system must be installed in each business. Multiple API management vendors in the market offer on-premise, cloud-based, or hybrid API Management capabilities. An API management platform comes with an API designer component that helps developers in each business to create APIs. Once the API is created, it needs to be published to the developer portal for outside consumption.
- Developer onboarding: Once APIs are created and hosted in API management platforms, each business is ready to accept traffic from the outside. The businesses must discover available APIs, try them out, and build the client applications to consume those APIs. Usually, the developer portal is hosted publicly to enable access for partner developers.
- API run time, governance, and monitoring: Developers from each business should have subscribed to each other’s APIs and have the credentials to access them. When APIs are invoked, API Gateway components of each business will receive the traffic and route it to the appropriate backend service. While doing that, the API Gateway can also provide other services such as authenticate and log requests, enforce policies, collect statistics and so on.
Taking APIs to the next level
What we have talked about is a straightforward example where businesses can collaborate digitally with APIs. But API management offers many more benefits beyond this. The most significant benefit is that APIs can generate revenues for companies via an API marketplace. Here businesses that produce APIs can list them for sale. Developers who plan to consume them can subscribe and start using them in their applications. Developers are typically billed according to the API call volumes they make.
I have summarised the major benefits of adopting an API management platform to extend your business ecosystem. From a business and technical standpoint, API management platforms provide a lot of value by digitally exposing existing services to the outside world. When properly planned, traditional companies can also sell their APIs via marketplaces to gain additional revenues.
Founded in 2005, WSO2 is one of the world’s best open source integration vendors, helping digitally driven organisations become integration agile. WSO2 is a global organisation with offices in Europe, the Americas, Sri Lanka and Australia.
WSO2 solutions give enterprises the flexibility to deploy applications and services on-premises, on private or public clouds, or in hybrid environments and easily migrate between them as needed. All of the products are pre-integrated, allowing enterprises to focus on value-added services and get to market faster.
