Here’s an example of how a business partnership might come about these days. Interaction with an online API partner portal will act as the initial “conversation” that leads to the partnership. If you want to integrate with Salesforce.com, you go to the Salesforce partner portal, figure out the relevant SDK/API, build an app and then submit it to the Salesforce AppExchange.  You don’t ever need to actually talk with anyone at Salesforce to become a business partner with the company.

Another example is the way many companies now enable access to their Web sites via Facebook Connect, Google+ Login or Twitter Login. This represents the first step towards establishing a business partnership with Facebook, Google or Twitter. It’s not new in the Web world and has been discussed for years. What makes it relevant to this discussion is the way it’s being applied to out-dated business processes and practices.

Great platform companies have realized this, “robotized” their business development processes and rationalized their business development teams. As robots are to manufacturing, APIs are to business development. Better technology means that we can focus our human resources on more valuable activities, since handshakes are now being made over OAuth instead of costly dinners and drinks.

“Government information shall be managed as an asset throughout its life cycle to promote interoperability and openness, and, wherever possible and legally permissible, to ensure that data are released to the public in ways that make the data easy to find, accessible, and usable” (emphasis mine).

No Dumping
The usual approach to this type of work is to simply publish raw data in a directory or repository and then create some fencing around the data that helps track usage and distribution. Essentially, making government data “open” becomes a data dumping operation. This practice fails on all of President Obama’s three key points. First, data dumps make finding valuable information not at all easy. Second, even though the content might appear in a standard format like XML, CSV or JSON, it is hardly accessible (except for to geeks, who love this kind of stuff). And finally, raw data is hardly ever usable. Instead, it’s a mind-numbing pile of characters and quote marks that must be massaged and re-interpreted before it comes close to usability.

So, while this new directive offers an opportunity to make available a vast amount of the data the government collects on our behalf, the devil is in the details. And the details are in the interface – the API. As with poorly-designed kitchen appliances and cryptic entertainment center remote controls, when it takes extensive documentation to explain how to use something, the design has failed. There’s a simple principle here. Poor API design results in unusable data.

Affordable Data
It doesn’t have to be this way, of course. Government departments have the opportunity to implement designs that meet the goals set forth in the executive order. They can make it easy for people to find, access and use the data. They can publish not just data but APIs that afford searching, filtering and exploring the data in a meaningful and helpful manner; APIs that empower both users and developers to successfully interact with the data, without resorting to a dashboard featuring dozens of options or mind-numbing explanations.

In the (likely) event that the initial open data release consists of mere data, companies and individuals would be well advised to resist the temptation to build a multitude of “one-off” applications, each of which solves a single problem or answers a narrow set of questions for some subset of the data. Instead, work should be put into converting the raw data into usable API formats such as Atom, OData, HAL, Collection+JSON and HTML (to name just a few). APIs should be designed with the same care that would be given to any interactive experience.  Investment in tools and technologies that can properly represent the data in multiple formats while supporting various use cases and access requirements will yield great results.

Open Data APIs
In the end, organizations that know the importance of a good interface, the power of choice and the freedom of flexible representations will be able to convert raw data into valuable information, which can be consumed by a wide range of users, platforms and devices. These considerations are essential to building and supporting open data APIs.

Because – ultimately – data isn’t open, unless it’s “easy to find, accessible, and usable”.

While several start-ups have demonstrated the potential of tapping the long-tail developer community (look at examples like Twillio, Tapjoy, Stripe and Braintree) the number of enterprises that have seen similar success is less clear (Amazon Web Services is an obvious counterpoint).

One reason for this is simple – enterprises have conflicting interests and are almost never set up to successfully service these communities at all costs. This doesn’t negate the value of fostering relations with the long tail. External developer programs make sense for enterprises and should be viewed as strategic, even if the immediate payback is not obvious. With the advent of the app economy, developers represent as important a channel to market as traditional distributors.

However, often overlooked in the race to launch an external API developer program is the potential benefit of an internal API developer program. Enterprises have, in many cases, thousands if not tens of thousands of developers internally. Often, internal developers are supplemented by contractors. Enabling all these developers to become mobile innovators through APIs holds out the promise of delivering the kinds of leaps in productivity, agility and experimentation that will benefit any enterprise.

To make internal developers innovation leaders, it is essential to provide a canonical way for these developers to access all corporate application and data resources. An API abstraction layer delivered through an ESB or API Gateway simplifies the process of API-ifying information resources and consuming APIs.

But that’s not enough because developers will still need a central directory or registry of APIs to discover which APIs are available and what these APIs do. In the WS*-centered Web services world of SOAP-oriented APIs, which most enterprises still inhabit, this function would be handled by a UDDI directory and some accompanying “repository” software. But in the API world, no exact analog has existed – in part because every API Management vendor has insisted on provisioning its API portal in the public cloud only, a place most enterprises are reluctant to post APIs aimed at internal developers. Layer 7 aims to bridge the gap.

The Layer7 API Portal is the first turnkey API developer portal that can be deployed 100% inside a customer’s private cloud, datacenter or IT facility. Moreover, it is the first developer portal to offer simultaneous support for both RESTful APIs and SOAPy APIs, meaning it can act as a substitute for existing UDDI-style services while providing a pathway to newer RESTful services. Best of all, it can be implemented with different grades of privacy so that the same API Portal can support internal, contract and external developers at the same time – with each group seeing only what the enterprise chooses.

By centralizing where APIs are presented for discovery and consumption by developers, enterprises can make it easier for their service innovators to build new capabilities and mash multiple existing services into newer composite business functions. They can introduce new apps and applications faster. They can respond to change faster. They can build and iterate on new mobile apps in less time, with less error. It all comes down to the API presentation layer.

With the steady decline of the PC business, Intel clearly has to look elsewhere for its future growth. The cloud datacenter is not a bad place to start. Cloud server farms clearly consume lots of processors. Still, servers powering Web sites can operate fine without APIs, thank-you. But servers powering mobile is a different story. Mobile apps (whether HTML5, hybrid or native) get the data that makes them valuable from applications that reside in datacenters. And APIs are the key to letting cloud data be sharable with mobile apps.

Clearly, app-centric “smart” phones and tablets and TVs and cars and watches and glasses are changing the way we go about our daily business. And APIs will power these smart devices by giving enterprise and Internet companies a way to push their data to apps. That hope of bridging the cloud with mobile is probably why Intel has kept its current API product intact. Mashery broadens Intel’s API scope by providing a way to not only share data with mobile apps but now also the developers that build these apps. But will this plan succeed?

If it does, it will take quite a bit of time. The reality today remains that Intel – even despite the semi-recent McAfee acquisition – is not oriented to selling software or even cloud services into the enterprise. It’s missing the sales force. It’s missing the history. And in many ways, it’s missing the rest of the software stack it needs to power the networking, infrastructure and application parts that underpin data in the cloud. That will make selling an API platform comprising a legacy API Gateway and newfound API developer platform a harder proposition. It’s kind of out there alone.

Another obvious roadblock to making the Mashery acquisition successful is that Intel’s existing API Gateway and the Mashery API service are designed for two very different audiences inside the enterprise, with un-reconcilable needs. The API Gateway is designed for an IT department that wants to run its API Management layer in its own datacenter. The Mashery offering is designed for a non-IT buyer (a mobile program manager, say) who wants to run everything in someone else’s cloud.

One is technical, the other is not. One is on-premise, the other is SaaS. One sells traditional software licenses, the other pure subscription. The first aims to address internal and external API integration challenges. The latter is only really concerned with the challenge of acquiring external API developers (though Mashery would probably protest this point).

Will the two be a marriage made in heaven? Given that the Intel/Mashery partnership is already a year old and that Mashery was barely able to grow its revenues in that time, the likelihood seems remote. But who knows for sure? And anyway, Intel has probably not bought Mashery for its $12M in revenue but for its long-term potential as a pathway to mobile.

We’ll also talk about the “-ilities” of an API Management platform: scalability, manageability, extensibility etc. We will illustrate each of these with a real-world Layer 7 customer example. You’ll see why these and other non-functional requirements matter just as much as the solution’s technical capabilities.

So, please join me and Layer 7 Product Manager Dana Crane as we discuss these key API Management criteria tomorrow. There will be time for questions – both technical and conceptual – and all attendees will receive a free copy of the recently-published Forrester Wave for API Management Platforms. See you tomorrow!

Register now for How to Choose the Right API Management Solution >>

Mobile devices and social media have multiplied the number of touch-points available for engaging buyers. The line between retail and “eTail” has grown blurry as location increasingly defines all shopping experiences. Big Data now makes it possible for marketers to tailor promotions to every shopper, based on buying history and inferred intent. And API-driven architectures provide a way to tie all online channels, data sources and cloud services together in an event-driven, context-aware network that can engage buyers wherever they are.

All these elements assembled together suggest a new era of personalized commerce. This will place the buyer back at the center of a commerce universe of disparate data, mobile, cloud and social elements that will converge to deliver him or her a more exact shopping experience tailored to his or her choice preferences at that point in time and that place in space.

For Layer 7, this convergence of trends that puts the shopper at the center of an API-connected ecosystem plays to two particular strengths. Firstly, it leverages Layer 7′s leadership in networking enterprise, mobile, social, cloud and partner services via APIs. Secondly, it cements a concept of enhanced identity, where a fuller user profile can be built around an ID to deliver a more complete view of that subject. Both will be essential for delivering on the vision of highly-personal commerce that spans online channels, is location-aware, leverages multiple data sources and can determine a context-specific action across mobile, payment and Web services.

To learn more, read the API-Driven Omni-Channel Commerce solution brief >>

For instance, most organizations will derive far more immediate payback from an API initiative if it enables internal developers, enterprise mobility initiatives, tighter partner integrations or even IT rationalization through hybrid cloud. Each of these endeavours will pay dividends in terms of productivity, agility, distribution and lowered IT costs. Each deserves its own dedicated discussion. However, underpinning all of these API business drivers  – external developers included – there is one often-overlooked consideration for cost and return in any API program: how do you introduce and innovate new APIs cost effectively?

Obviously, there are many ways to stand up an API. Many packaged software applications have some kind of API already, even if some are XML- or SOAP- centric. But in many instances, nothing exists except the desire to expose a piece of functionality or quantity of data as an API. Programmers can obviously build “programmable  interfaces” onto almost anything. It just takes time and people. However, the results will be brittle and the journey expensive.

A faster, less costly and more flexible route is to use an adaptation layer that can talk to various application or data backends and dynamically render one or more as an API. Using a backend adaptation layer can, with the right product, also solve the related problem of iterating on an API, both in terms of versioning but also composition. Add to that the promise of facilitating new business functionality by orchestrating API interactions with external mobile, social and cloud services and you get a pretty compelling ROI story.

Not surprisingly, Layer 7 provides such an adaptation layer. Our API Gateways provide more than just security and management; they simplify backend connectivity, new API formation (i.e. composition) and novel orchestrations with all kinds of cloud, social and mobile services. Like many of our API compatriots, we provide tools that help enterprises build and foster developer ecosystems. But we also realized early on that much of the cost and potential of an API program will rest on how quickly and cost-effectively new services can be launched and evolved. Something worth considering the next time you evaluate the ROI of an API program.

Arguing about “who owns the customer” or that “our customers expect a certain level of service” is so far behind the curve it’s laughable and service providers simply can’t derail innovation by imposing expensive and exhausting procedures. But to be clear, this is a competitive market and service providers will lose more ground unless a contemporary model for collaboration is adopted.

The Amdocs OTT Monetization Solution allows service providers to leverage network assets to create value for OTT providers and monetize service collaborations. Layer 7’s API Management Suite of products defines a new methodology for telco APIs, bringing interface, identity and developer management together in a cohesive platform that can serve mobile, enterprise and internal applications equally. Layer 7 and Amdocs will be working together to deliver a best-of-breed solution, addressing the full lifecycle of telco API needs.

This new approach will yield great results. We have already seen Spotify implement a flat-rate service with T-Mobile Germany. Also, network-enhanced enterprise tools (e.g. AT&T Business Services) are becoming commonplace as LTE networks expand. APIs are the fabric that ensures these collaborations are possible and can be brought to market quickly and efficiently.

Simply put: “things” generate petabytes of data. Putting sensors on everything, as both Cisco and GE propose, creates a data nightmare. Hadoop has made analyzing big volumes of data much easier but what happens when you want to share a small sliver of that information with a customer or partner? After all, the purpose of “Big Data” collection is not altruism – it’s about monetization. In many situations, this will only be possible if data can be shared easily.

A Data Lens gives IoT data owners – such as manufactures or telco carriers – an easy and secure way to share a focused and billable data set with their customers and partners. Anything outside of the scope of a Data Lens cannot be accessed, whereas anything inside the lens is  “in focus”. The data in focus can be raw or aggregated. There can be any number of Data Lenses on a data set. They can be used internally or shared securely with external partners and customers. Data access through individual Data Lenses can be governed by service level agreements and – through metering – monetized.

For manufacturers and network operators looking at ways to share focused data slices from their Big Data, a Data Lens solves a big problem. By leveraging the Layer 7 API Gateway’s unique ability to focus on small data sets inside larger ones and to present these data sets as secure APIs, customized to specific customers or partners, it’s possible for IoT operators to drive new revenue from their Big Data.

1. There’s just so much of it that it’s easy to lose sight of the byte-sized trees in the petabyte-sized forest

2. It’s locked away in every recess of the enterprise – from applications to relational databases, to non-relational databases, to in-memory caches, public clouds, Hadoop clusters etc.

Data growth and diversity have made data access harder. But data access is the foundation of mobile app development, anything to do with the Internet of Things (IoT) and all kinds of Big Data analytics. Given this need for data in the face of access complexity, it didn’t come as a total surprise to see some of the most innovative Layer 7 customers start using our API Gateway technology as a novel data access, aggregation and presentation solution. As our resident IoT expert Holger Reinhardt pointed out to me: they are using our products to build highly-customized “lenses” across their distributed data backends. To me, this characterization is perfect because what these customers are looking for is perspective on their data. A lens gives perspective with focus.

Now, a Layer 7 API Gateway is more than just a data integration solution. Our technology has several unique features that make it ideal for collecting, composing and presenting data. First, we can talk to all kinds of data sources natively. That wasn’t easy to achieve and it’s something we developed over many years. Second, we can represent the source data as a RESTful API. Even better, we can dynamically generate a virtual API view for a specific user, app, partner etc. The API then becomes the entry point for accessing the aggregated data. Third, we can add fine-grained access and protection policies that ensure only authorized consumers get visibility to specific slices of data, while also protecting the data sources from attack and misuse. When combined, these capabilities give organizations a way to focus on just the information that is relevant to a particular mobile, IoT or Big Data analytics project and then share selectively with an app, cloud service, developer or partner.

A data lens is born!

If you want to learn more about our Data Lens solution, have a read of this new solution brief. Also, feel free to reach out to us with any questions.