New WSO2 White Paper Examines Best Practices for Building an Effective Enterprise API Marketplace

Mountain View, CA, June 28, 2017 -- Increasingly, organizations are turning to API management initiatives in their journey to becoming thriving digital businesses. However, to truly reap the benefits of an API program, organizations need to move beyond basic API management and create API marketplaces that promote the consumption and use of APIs to deliver new apps and services. A new white paper from WSO2 explores the business and technology best practices that enterprises need to consider in creating an API marketplace as part of a successful API strategy. It can be downloaded at http://wso2.com/whitepapers/building-an-api-strategy-using-an-enterprise-api-marketplace.

The paper, “Building an API Strategy Using an Enterprise API Marketplace,” was written by WSO2 Senior Director of Solutions Architecture Mifan Careem. It begins by providing a top-level overview of API management and its various components. Next, the paper explains how an API marketplace serves as a platform for effectively connecting producers and consumers of APIs, along with its role in building an effective API strategy that encompasses not just technology, but also the business and human factors.

The paper then examines the key business advantages of creating API marketplaces—from encouraging API design and development, as well as the discovery and reuse of APIs by consumers, to facilitating cross-division usage and monetization. The paper also reviews the types of APIs that benefit from being available in an API developer portal.

Next, the paper outlines the best practices employed by enterprises, who have implemented successful API marketplaces. These include:

• Implementing a full API management platform as part of an organization’s technology strategy, with the developer portal as a mandatory component of the platform.
• Encouraging consumers to use the API platform to ensure that API developers publish their APIs with enough documentation through the platform—and make sure application developers use the published APIs.
• Promoting API reuse through incentives, such as having a leaderboard that highlights top API publishers and application developers, and displaying the APIs with the most subscribers on developer portal dashboards.
• Monetizing APIs to enable cross-business revenue opportunities.
• Incorporating analytics to provide a centralized view of the platform, featuring real-time notifications, alerts, streaming analytics, and batch reports.
• Employing an overarching governance model to ensure that the right APIs will be published in accordance with compliance requirements.

The paper concludes by discussing how enterprises will need to go beyond API marketplaces to ecosystem management once applications begin to grow beyond reasonable numbers.

About the Author
Mifan Careem is the senior director of solutions architecture at WSO2. In his role, he works closely with customers liaising with WSO2 engineering and sales teams to analyze and define domain specific solution architectures in client domains. Mifan has extensive experience in SOA and industry-specific solution architectures and specializes in spatial architectures and GIS, e-government cloud, emergency management, and big data analytics. Prior to joining WSO2, he co-founded Respere in 2007, a technology startup specializing in humanitarian ICT solutions.

About WSO2
WSO2 uniquely increases the agility of digital businesses and enterprises engaging in a digital transformation. It offers the only completely integrated enterprise platform that enables businesses to build, integrate, manage, secure and analyze their APIs, applications, and Web services—on-premises, in the cloud, on mobile devices, and across the Internet of Things. Leading enterprise customers worldwide rely on WSO2’s award-winning 100% open source platform and its robust performance and governance for their mission-critical applications. Today, these businesses represent nearly every sector: health, financial, retail, logistics, manufacturing, travel, technology, telecom and more. Visit http://wso2.com to learn more, or check out the WSO2 community on the WSO2 Blog, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

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Shifali Erasmus
Kinetic.PR, LLC for WSO2
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