Background/History APIs have been around since the earliest days of software development. There has always been a need to document these APIs to facilitate teams collaboratively creating complex software. Originally, this documentation took the form of just regular formatted documents designed for human consumption. As the use of the Internet grew in the 90’s, companies realized that they needed a way to describe their APIs that could be read and processed by other computers and development tools. The advent of web services drove this shift in mindset from documentation being solely for human developers to being something that could also be used by other computers to improve productivity and data integrity. WSDL and XML Web Services Web Services Description Language (WSDL) was one of the first widely used documentation formats to describe web services. Traditional web services are an evolution of the older Remote Procedure Call (RPC) technology that allowed different components of a software system to communicate over a network. Web services took the base concepts of RPC and allowed them to efficiently operate across the Internet. A defining characteristic of these web services was the use of XML to structure the information being passed in both the request and the response. WSDL followed this module and used XML to document the operations available in the web service and the structure of the XML that was being passed in the request/response. For example, a web service may have an operation named “createBook” that takes an XML data structure such as “Jules Verne”. A partial WSDL for the above structure might look like the following: This structure allows an application to know that the available operation or action is “createBook” and that the operation takes two parameters “title” and “author” both of which are string values. The application can then validate the request before processing it to ensure that it is in the correct format. Additionally, through the use of the XSL, this WSDL documentation can be converted into a human-readable web page. So a single document can serve both the application and the developer. WSDL and SOAP Web Services A need arose for a more consistently formatted structure for web services after awhile. With regular XML web services, it is up to the creator of the service to define the format and structure of the WSDL. However, that complicates integrating services from multiple different systems or vendors. Additionally, it doesn’t provide any standard mechanism for defining security requirements for the web service. Simple Object Assessment and Plan (SOAP) was developed as a standard way to structure web services to promote interoperability and security. SOAP is an extension of standard XML web services with strict rules around the formatting and structure of the XML request and response. The WSDL documentation format for SOAP web services was also extended to facilitate documenting these web services in a standard way. OpenAPI (Swagger) and REST Web Services The API approach we now refer to as REST (Representation State transfer) APIs first originated in a doctoral dissertation by Roy Fielding in 2000. Roy wanted to design an approach to API services that could easily be leveraged by any system without the complexities of SOAP web services. His solution was to develop an architecture that revolved around resource or data object types and then implement a stateless communication protocol based on HTTP verbs and the json data structure. So now, developers and systems know about an objects data structure, such as a book, and then use standard HTTP verbs to control the interaction with that data structure. This simplifies the development and consumption of these services since support for these types of interactions are built into most application frameworks. Using the create book example above, with a RESTful web service, the developer would make a simple “POST https://api.example.com/book” http request passing a simple JSON body such as the following: { title: ‘20,000 Leagues Under the Sea’ author: ‘Jules Verne’ } This format is simpler, uses less bandwidth, and can be efficiently processed by most programming languages and frameworks without needing memory-intensive XML parsing systems and complex schema validators. A new format for documenting these RESTful web services was also needed. That format is known as the OpenAPI Specification format (originally known as Swagger). This specification format follows the same base principals as RESTful web services and uses either JSON or YAML data structure to document the available objects, operations, requests, and responses. The following is an example of the OpenAPI specification in YAML format. openapi: '3.0.0' info: version: 1.0.0 title: Book Management paths: '/book': post: summary: "Create a book" description: "Creates a new book." operationId: "createBook" responses: '200': description: "successful operation" requestBody: content: application/json: schema: type: object properties: title: description: Name of the book. type: string author: description: Name of the author. type: string YAML provides an easier to read structure for the API documentation and there are several Javascript libraries that convert this documentation into user-friendly HTML pages. The above example just says that there is a URL at “/book” that the user would make an HTTP POST request to passing a json object with fields for title and author. The OpenAPI spec goes beyond just defining the call structure though to supporting information about error states, example code, and additional narrative documentation for the developer. Unifying your documentation Neither WSDL or OpenAPI are better than the other. Both WSDL and OpenAPI documentation formats have their use cases and will likely exist within an organization depending on your API landscape. What is important is that your APIs are documented and that your development teams can easily locate and access the documentation for your APIs in whatever format they may exist in. Apiboost provides a unified catalog of your API documentation in a consistent and usable format to facilitate your team in quickly locating and utilizing your APIs.

📷 © iStock.com/Andrey Suslov Apiboost was listed under multiple sections in the report San Diego, CA., August 30th — Apiboost, an enterprise API portal SaaS platform, has been identified by Gartner as a Sample Vendor in the Gartner Hype Cycle for APIs and Business Ecosystems 2021. Apiboost is mentioned under the API Marketplaces and API Developer Portals in Banking categories. Gartner Hype Cycle reports offer insights into the relative maturity of technologies operating within specific industries. Apiboost’s inclusion as a new entrant to the report this year shows that Gartner’s analysts are assigning a higher value to the importance of APIs and API Marketplace across multiple industries. Listing Apiboost as a Sample Vendor underscores the value of the Apiboost platform and the impact of API Marketplaces and Developer Portals across several business ecosystems. As Gartner explains, “the API developer portal is a foundational technology and a prerequisite for API marketplaces that support the pursuit of higher-order business models such as banking as a service.” “We’re proud that Gartner has recognized Apiboost as an API marketplace and API developer portal solution. The report touched on several trends driving the API economy forward, and the need for organizations to leverage impactful API portal and API marketplace solutions,” said Ron Huber, Founder of Apiboost. Portals Promote Awareness and Increase Ease of Use “API developer portals provide an advanced approach to connect and manage APIs of partner solutions,” said Don Free, VP Analyst at Gartner in the report. “APl developer portals promote and optimize API consumption and performance through both functional and technical documentation and tools,” he added. One of Apiboost’s core features is the Product Optimizer, which allows the productization of APIs and any content associated with them. Not only does this enable products and content on the developer portals to be controlled at a Product Owner level, it also means that organizations can manage content associated with products, from the description in the catalog, to blogs, videos, events and forums. “Transparency and self-service access are increasingly important characteristics for successful API development and usability,” Free added. Team Builder is another Apiboost feature, enabling administrators to build teams and gather team members to innovate on applications and products in a group. This robust tool is ideal for assigning apps and products to departments, partners, and customers for effective development while securely exposing data to approved team members. Gartner, "Hype Cycle for APIs and Business Ecosystems, 2021," Mark O'Neill, John Santoro, July 27, 2021. Gartner subscribers can view the full report here. Gartner Research Methodology, Gartner Hype Cycle, https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hype-cycle Gartner Disclaimer Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. Gartner and Hype Cycle are registered trademarks and service marks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. About Apiboost Apiboost is a ready-to-market portal solution supported by a complete set of digital transformation services. It is an easy-to-use, full-featured API portal to deploy APIs for internal and external use. The Apiboost team has worked with many Enterprise companies to realize their goals with a groundbreaking portal and digital solutions. Whether the need is for a simple and fast-to-market solution or a global, Federated divisional/regional approach, Apiboost can help your team find the right program. For more information, visit: https://www.apiboost.com/

Traditional developer portals act as single points of access for developers looking to use an organization's API offerings. But modern-day developer portals, which are now commonly referred to as API portals, need to do so much more. According to Gartner®, “API portals ensure that developers can discover and use your APIs, but often fail to drive API adoption due to poor developer experience. Application leaders should deliver separate targeted internal and external API portals to enable optimal developer experience and adaptive governance.” The proposed solution by Gartner? To build API Portals That Drive API Adoption Among Internal and External Developer Communities. Building a robust API portal from scratch is difficult and time-consuming. Today, platforms like Apiboost have made standing up professional and inviting portals at cloud speed a cinch. But launching and marketing an API portal to third parties can still be a daunting process. In this article, you will learn about the importance of promoting API adoption, the key obstacles that organizations need to consider, and how to increase their active user base. Why Is Increasing API Adoption Important? API adoption is an umbrella term that gauges how users engage with your API assets, from the number of active API consumers to how often they interact with your API ecosystem. In the early days of APIs, businesses were hesitant to use them until they were widely adopted, but today APIs account for 80% of all Web traffic. APIs play a pivotal role in creating new products and services by enabling collaboration between companies. Ensuring high API adoption rates is important because APIs have no intrinsic business value if no one is using them, pushing companies to focus on improving their API adoption rates to win and retain an active user base. Taking advantage of the booming API economy requires developing a solid API adoption strategy, which brings us to defining the benchmarks to measure your performance against empirically. Read More: What is API Management: Your Guide to What You Need to Know 5 Ways to Boost API Adoption An API portal is a linchpin that ensures high API adoption rates, providing a single point of access to all APIs and an ecosystem for users to interact with your APIs. API portals can help you drastically boost your adoption rates in many ways. Below, we cover all of them. Read More: The Ultimate Guide to API Portals in 2022 1. Remember That Modern API Portals Aren’t Just for Developers With digital transformation on the agenda of every forward-thinking brand, the role of the API portal has changed. Gone are the days of API portals housing code and documentation for developer eyes only. With the growth in usage of APIs and the API-first methodology taking root, particularly at the enterprise level, developer portals have morphed into API portals. These modern platforms act as a way for businesses to drive innovation, revenue, and collaboration among developers as well as other stakeholders. In fact, what we’re seeing is a rise in citizen developers working on APIs to become products that serve developers, marketers, and C-suite players alike. This is in line with Gartner guidance to software engineer leaders on productizing APIs. In their report, ‘Top 10 Aspects Software Engineering Leaders Need to Know About APIs’, Gartner Analysts Shameen Pillai and Mark O'Neill advise software engineering leaders to, “treat APIs as products by creating the role of an API product manager to promote a consumer-centric product mindset for APIs”. [Also,] Software Engineering Leaders should “improve the visibility, roadmap, and interoperability of APIs by managing the life cycle of APIs. With this trend in mind, be sure to offer features that will entice developers, as well as their non-technical colleagues. 2. Take Content Marketing Seriously Technical documentation lives at the core of an API portal, and producing good docs is a strength of many IT organizations. For example, Divio, an open-source company that maintains the Django web application framework, has compiled a best practices guide that's seen wide adoption across the industry. Divio’s "grand unified theory of documentation" holds that your docs should cover four different use cases: tutorials (learning-oriented), how-to guides (problem-oriented), explanatory (understanding-oriented), and reference (information-oriented). While great technical docs are fundamental to retaining devs interested in your product offerings, effective portal promotion requires exploring other ways to reach the developer community. And developers can be a struggle to connect with, they can smell marketing-speak from a mile away and are typically turned off by marketing content. But content marketing is still a highly effective strategy to reach developers. The secret is to reach them where they stand. Developers work in a rapidly changing professional environment that can be exhausting for them to keep up with. Help them with content that includes what people are doing with your APIs or your technology. Write case studies, mention success stories, and interview developers who are using your technology. Developers spend a lot of time reading, and respond well to video series and podcasts that allow them to take a break when the content is relative to trending topics, news, and interesting questions. Just make sure your dev portal is a side dish in your content to avoid a promotional tone. Plus, traditional content marketing techniques like reaching out to publishers and newsletters in relevant spaces and offering to write content for free, or asking about sponsorship opportunities are often effective strategies to reach developers. 3. Build and Promote Your API Ecosystem—Not Just Your Portal An API portal is a key part of your organizational infrastructure, but it shouldn’t be your final goal. Instead, focus on building and promoting your API ecosystem. APIs should be classed as products that can be promoted to consumers along with the capabilities of the enterprise, eventually creating a larger API ecosystem. In today’s digital world, no organization can build every aspect of its platform or service on its own. Instead, they rely on third-party APIs to help fill the gaps. An API ecosystem encourages collaboration, providing value for both internal and external resources. This helps foster community growth, which leads to further creativity and innovation. An API portal should provide documentation and tools that make promotion even easier, attracting organizations to the ecosystem, rather than having to constantly promote. It’s important that organizations also use an outside-in approach to build an ecosystem by looking for ways to solve business needs, understanding what the market wants, and building APIs to fulfill that demand, rather than simply building APIs that offer little to no value. 4. Don’t Forget About Developers! Developers consume massive volumes of information in their day-to-day work routine. Much of the time, these developers don't know what they need to know before they encounter it and so rely heavily on websites that are good at surfacing new techniques, products, and workflows while helping them separate the grain from the chaff. If done right, these niche channels can pay huge dividends: Reddit: Dev-focused Reddit subs are bustling with developers looking to explore new technologies and APIs. The /r/webdev subreddit alone has some 750,000 subscribers. Reddit's algorithm promotes posts based on their engage - number of responses and upvotes. Promotional posts are often downvoted out of view, so focus on engaging in conversation, adding insights, and telling stories along with dev-focused articles as your top-level posts. Quora: A channel like Quora can be an effective place to get the word out. Answer relevant questions thoughtfully and in-depth with a link to your portal, and you'll stand out from the torrent of low-value promotional answers on the platform. Product Hunt: When your API portal is ready to launch, adding your site to ProductHunt can help gain mindshare and visibility. You only get one chance, so do your research first. Directories: API directories are lists of publicly-available APIs with search features to help developers discover resources. It's worth taking the time to list your offerings on directories like ProgrammableWeb, RapidAPI, and APIs.io. Catalogs: Catalog sites like Rakuten RapidAPI are similar to API directories and provide additional tooling for devs to work with service offerings like testing and monitoring. 5. Leverage Social Media Twitter is incredibly popular with developers because its short-form content makes it easy to scan a large volume of information and engage with others working on similar problems. The platform also has an incredibly vibrant developer advocate community. And while developers will follow a company page, they interact with people. However, a high follower count isn't necessary to use the platform effectively. Just be a part of relevant discussions, easily surfaced through following relevant hashtags. Research the hashtags that are relevant to your portal, set up alerts for them, and use them to start discussions. LinkedIn is an important channel to ensure that your portal is discoverable (via its profile), but building a following or using sponsored postings are important to get your message out on this platform to developers. New feature announcements, beta programs, and links to quality dev-focused content are good choices for sharing on your LinkedIn channel. Reusing your video content on YouTube, or making it your primary distribution channel for video content, is a great way to reach developers. While most general channels fare better on the platform with fewer channels and more attention, dev-focused video content should be organized by topic in separate channels, preferably in sequence to encourage developers to keep watching and engaging. You can also make it easy for them to share your best content on other platforms. 6. Host, Attend, or Sponsor an Event Developers typically love webinars and tech conferences because they offer the opportunity to interact and connect with others in the industry. The pandemic has made hosting virtual meetups truly normal. Writing code can be an isolating experience at times, and the opportunity to engage professionally with others in a social atmosphere is appealing. Tech conferences range from small to huge and often offer opportunities to speak or for sponsorship. Meetup now allows virtual meetups and can be used for recurrent get-togethers centered around a relevant technology or industry. Webinars offer another effective tool to educate potential users about how your product works and your unique value proposition in a friendly and laid-back setting. What Are the Key Metrics to Measure API Adoption? It's essential to measure API adoption to identify patterns in usage and areas of improvement. We're going to zero in on the most critical metrics you can use to measure API adoption to help you always stay focused on the things that truly move the needle. 1. Active Users How many API consumers use your API over a certain period? Keeping track of that number helps you gauge the size of your user base and get a better idea of the business value your API assets generate for your organization. You can measure active users by tracking how many users make requests to the API daily, weekly, and monthly to identify a general trend. 2. New User Registrations This metric tracks how many people sign up to use your API over a given period. Measuring the number of new user registrations provides insight into how rapidly your user base is growing and how effective your marketing campaigns truly are. You can track this metric by looking at the number of people who sign up to use your API ecosystem daily, weekly, and monthly. 3. The Number of API Calls The number of API calls is a crucial metric that can measure API adoption, providing insight into the engagement levels and helping you plan and predict the growing needs of your user base. You can track the number of API calls by monitoring the number of requests that are made to the API over a certain period. 4. Time to First Hello World (TTFHW) Time to first hello world is a metric that measures the time it took for a new API consumer to sign up, go through the onboarding process, read the instructions needed to understand how your API works, and execute their first API call. This metric measures how quickly developers start using the API and can help you identify where the onboarding process or API documentation needs improvement. Track this metric to understand how easy it is to use the API and gauge the success of your API adoption. You can measure this metric by calculating the time from the moment the user enters your API ecosystem to when they make their first API call. Read More: Types of APIs Explained - How Are They Different? What Are the Most Common API Adoption Challenges By understanding the most common challenges related to API adoption, you can take proactive steps to overcome these obstacles that hinder the growth of your API program. 1. Regulatory Compliance & Industry Standards API compliance means ensuring that an API meets the requirements specified by the relevant governing institution or other regulatory entity. These requirements may include industry-specific laws, such as HIPPA for the healthcare industry, or general regulations such as GDPR and CCPA to protect data privacy. Regulatory non-compliance can significantly hurt the organization, leading to a wast range of negative consequences - from fines to reputational losses. API compliance issues reduce your API adoption rates by deterring organizations from partnering with you because the failure to comply with regulations creates an additional layer of business risks for all stakeholders. 2. Security With Gartner projecting APIs to become the primary attack vector in 2022, implementing security measures and policies across all of your APIs is vital. API security measures protect your data from being accessed and modified by cyber attackers that can use the loopholes in your security policies to reach a malicious goal. API users have become increasingly aware of the security risks associated with API use as massive data breaches make headlines every year. If your API isn't secure enough, users may be reluctant to use it, which, in turn, limits API adoption rates. 3. Access Control Granular access control is also critical for security and scalability - you want to authorize access to specific data or functionalities based on the permissions granted to a given user. This is especially important as your API ecosystem grows and starts interacting with many different teams. Without advanced access controls in place, your API adoption rates are likely to suffer as your APIs won't be able to meet the needs of a large segment of your user base, especially enterprise clients with complex organizational structures and cross-departmental relationships. 4. Business Agility APIs need to maintain a balance between enforcing compliance standards and security measures and being user-friendly for API technical and non-technical consumers alike. With the rise of citizen development, the rapidly growing trend of getting business units involved in API product development, it’s essential to provide non-IT users with the ecosystem they need to create API products and use APIs as part of their workflows with little to coding skills. According to Gartner, the number of active citizen developers in large enterprises will be four times greater than the number of IT professionals by 2023. Those who fail to adapt to this significant shift in the API economy may have lower API adoption rates and miss out on substantial market opportunities in the near future. Read More: How Citizen Developers Will Impact the API Marketplace in 2022 and Beyond Apiboost: An Enterprise API Portal Platform Primed for API Monetization Focusing on organic engagement with the wider development community and including developer-focused content marketing in your efforts is an effective way to grow the user base of your API offering. By working to include developers within your own organization in your developer marketing efforts, you’re likely to build velocity in delivering messaging that entices third parties to discover your APIs. Apiboost is a cloud-based API portal platform with rich functionality and high extensibility. As well as providing functionality for building out flexible catalogs for your APIs, Apiboost lets you productize APIs through Product Optimizer and enable people to collaborate in teams with Team Builder. With Product Optimizer, your APIs can become shoppable products controlled at a Product Owner level, enabling authorized administrators to add new content, descriptions, blog posts, video, events, and even discussion forums to help educate third parties about your APIs. With Team Builder, administrators can manage collaborative environments with assigned roles and permissions. This is great for assigning apps and products to departments, partners, and customers for effective development, all while securely exposing data to team members who are authorized to see it. Learn more about our API portal and how Apiboost can help you engage with developers better, schedule a demo with us.

📷 Photo 106082871 / Gartner © Casimirokt | Dreamstime.com Apiboost was listed under the API marketplaces section of the report. San Diego, CA., August 1st — Apiboost, an enterprise API portal SaaS platform, has been identified by Gartner as a Sample Vendor in the Gartner Hype Cycle for Utility Industry IT 2021. Apiboost is mentioned in the API Marketplaces category. Gartner Hype Cycle reports “provide a graphic representation of the maturity and adoption of technologies and applications, and how they are potentially relevant to solving real business problems and exploiting new opportunities”. We are of the view that Apiboost’s inclusion as a new entrant to the report this year shows that Gartner analysts are assigning a higher value to the importance of APIs and API Marketplace within the utility industry. To explain the impact of APIs in the market, Gartner points to the following: “Use of APIs is growing; according to the infrastructure and security vendor CloudFlare, in 2020, API traffic grew 300% faster than web traffic, reaching 50% of HTTP traffic. This demonstrates the need for API marketplaces to discover APIs from the large amount of APIs available”. We believe that the listing of Apiboost as a Sample Vendor underscores the value of the Apiboost platform and the impact of Developer portals and API Marketplaces in the utility industry. “We’re proud that Gartner has recognized Apiboost as an API marketplace and API portal solution for the utility sector. The report touched on a number of crucial trends driving the API economy forward, which in turn, is fuelling the need for impactful API portal and API marketplace solutions,” said Ron Huber, Founder of Apiboost. “API Marketplaces Increase Developer Visibility and Consumer Mindshare” “External API marketplaces allow organizations to share APIs with a community of developers, including facilitating an ecosystem by enabling partners to implement solutions using their APIs,” Mark O'Neill, VP Analyst at Gartner, mentioned in the report. Apiboost’s core features include the Product Optimizer, which allows for APIs and any content associated with them to be productized. This enables products and content on the developer portals to be controlled at a Product Owner level, and dictates can manage content associated with products, including the description in the catalog, blogs, videos, events and forums. “For API providers, registering APIs in API marketplaces can increase developer visibility and consumer mind share,” according to the report, giving them the ability “to drive API usage and, by extension, business impact,” O’Neill continued. Another key Apiboost feature is the robust Team Builder, which enables administrators to build teams and gather team members to innovate on applications and products in a group environment. This powerful tool is great for assigning apps and products to departments, partners, and customers for effective development while securely exposing data to approved team members. Gartner, "Hype Cycle for Utility Industry IT, 2021," Nicole Foust, July 21, 2021. Gartner subscribers can view the full report here. Gartner Research Methodology, Gartner Hype Cycle, https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hype-cycle Gartner Disclaimer Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. Gartner and Hype Cycle are registered trademarks and service marks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. About Apiboost Apiboost is a ready-to-market portal solution supported by a complete set of digital transformation services. It is an easy-to-use, full-featured API portal to deploy APIs for internal and external use. The Apiboost team has worked with many Enterprise companies to realize their goals with a groundbreaking portal and digital solutions. Whether the need is for a simple and fast-to-market solution or a global, Federated divisional/regional approach, Apiboost can help your team find the right program. For more information, visit: https://www.apiboost.com/

The Goal To show the ROI of their API program, Allstate knew they had to quickly build and launch an API Portal on budget. The Challenge The Allstate team lacked the specific knowledge around API Portals and Apigee Edge to bring their vision to life, resulting in consistent delays and budget issues. The Solution Allstate brought in Achieve Internet, an Apigee preferred partner, to create and implement a developer portal. The Impact The portal launched within 90 days of Achieve Internet coming on board, which resulted in a 181% increase in digital engagement across the business. “Achieve Internet helped us provide a truly best-in-class developer portal experience for our developers and all the folks that are consuming our APIs… Certain things are vital to the success of a developer portal. The packages offered by Achieve Internet provide you—from Day 1—the ability to deliver an experience that will get you high marks in terms of engaging your developers.” - Senior API Evangelist, Allstate How Allstate Boosted Their API Engagement by Over 180% After Launching an API Portal in Less Than 90 Days The Goal: Show ROI of Their API Program Allstate is a US-based insurance giant that provides insurance products to over 16 million households. They were searching for a way to gain new revenue channels and wanted to improve the experience of developers from other companies who needed to consume their APIs to help deliver digital capabilities to their customers. The Challenge: Building a New Skillset The challenge was to create an API portal that would provide an intuitive user experience for developers while being a scalable and more profitable solution for the organization. Before working with Apigee along with Achieve Internet, the insurance carrier had to overcome numerous challenges to expand their revenue channels and improve their developer experience: A lack of visibility and adoption of APIs internally and externally. A resource-heavy service model for their Roadside Assistance program with an absence of activities that drive efficiency, cost savings, and new revenue opportunities. A shortage of technical talent to successfully create and support a Drupal developer portal. A limited understanding of how Apigee Edge can be optimized. Knowing that they were behind schedule and over budget, they knew they needed help to save the situation. The Solution: Bring in a Trusted Partner to Build Their API Portal Allstate called in for Achieve Internet, an Apigee certified partner, to create and implement their API portal. Achieve Internet used the following tools to continuously optimize the company’s developer experience: Apiboost: an enterprise-grade API portal with the plugin architecture needed for a quick and scalable solution. Boosters: individual plugins that expand the functionalities of the core Apiboost solution, including Teams (for granular access control), SSO, RBAC, CI/CD, and Advanced Analytics. The new portal gave developers ease of access to APIs to empower innovation within the enterprise while its ease-of-use helped speed up the implementation of their roadside assistance APIs. The Impact: Live in 90 Days Following its partnership with Achieve Internet, Allstate managed to turn things around, optimizing their workflows, lowering their costs, saving them time, and securing the future of their development ecosystem: The portal launched within 90 days of Achieve Internet joining the project. The streamlined developer experience resulted in a 181% increase in digital engagement across the business. Multiple divisions are now engaged in the API-first digital transformation the InsureTech space requires. Achieve Internet increased the capacity of Allstate’s API program to over 2,000,000 digital rescues while saving over $3 million in API-related costs. The portal made it easy for developers to quickly access APIs and find up-to-date documentation, promoting innovation. Allstate was again recognized as a top 50 user experience company, a 2019 Digital Edge “50” winner. If you would like to listen to the webinar where Allstate tells us about the impact of Apigee and Achieve, click here. Listen to our Webinar! If you would like to listen to the webinar where our InsureTech clients tells us about the impact of Apigee and Achieve, click here.

The Goal Experian knew they needed to increase their API Catalogue to show their partners the depth and impact-driven by their API Program. The Challenge With so many companies in so many regions - combining and providing access to all of their data through an API Portal was a regulations nightmare to navigate. The Solution Experian trusted Achieve Internet to create a multi-tenant solution to build a unified portal with sufficient access controls to maintain global compliance. The Impact Experian is now able to gather, analyze, and share data with their global partner network, resulting in a 300% increase of their API catalog within the first 6 months of launching their API Portal with Achieve Internet. Watch Experian discuss their new API Portal "We are not slowing down. Our executive team is very happy with our progress. They know this is working well for us. Business Units are now independently adding API’s, expanding our operational capabilities and revenue.” - Global Senior Director of Platform Evangelism for Experian Since its inception in 1996, Experian, a multi-national credit reporting company, has always aimed to set standards for the industry. As the company grew, the leadership sought to expand Experian’s global footprint by enhancing its existing developer portal to increase developer API adoption across the globe. Experian called in for Achieve Internet to centralize their API assets in one place and segment them according to regional laws and regulations. The Goal: Increased API Adoption Drives Revenue Since its inception in 1996, Experian, a multi-national credit reporting company, has always aimed to set standards for the industry. As the company grew, the leadership sought to expand Experian’s global footprint by enhancing its existing developer portal to increase developer API adoption across the globe. Experian called in for Achieve Internet to centralize their API assets in one place and segment them according to regional laws and regulations. However, like any successful venture, they were running into some growing pains. The Challenge: Disconnected Data Experian’s developer portal was limiting its global growth due to the lack of tools needed to make API localization effective and scalable. Successful international expansion required the company to overcome the following challenges within the existing ecosystem: The need to maintain multiple developer portals with overlapping functionalities An uneven, unpersonalized experience for users and developers in different regions The failure to increase adoption among business units to drive growth Limited API visibility across regions, which hurt innovation and revenue growth These issues were driving up operational costs, limiting their global expansion, stifling the user experience, and, ultimately, stunting revenue growth. The Solution: Bringing Everything Into One API Portal Experian approached Achieve Internet, an Apigee Edge and Drupal-certified partner for a custom multi-tenant solution to make their API program work. Achieve Internet delivered a single developer portal for accessing multiple instances of the Apigee Edge platform with the help of the following tools: Content Management: Drupal was deployed for its enterprise-grade functionality, flexibility, and reliability. Multi-tenant Apigee Integration: A custom module was created to allow connections to an unlimited number of Apigee Edge backends. Individual Apigee connections are associated with site regions for consumers to use a single account to manage access keys and product subscriptions across all the regions they operate. Groups: The Groups module was used to generate documentation pages around a common topic and, optionally, restrict access to a whitelist of users and teams. Paragraphs: Content on the Global Developer Portal allows for reusable sections of “paragraph” content. Site Managers can choose from a library of content sections to build new pages quickly. Custom Theming and Navigation: From the Product Catalog to individual FAQs, all content can be published globally or selectively by region while taking into account all applicable access restrictions for private offerings. Content Migration: The new Global Developer Portal incorporated content from three previous standalone portals operating in independent regions. New CMS structures were put in place for administrators to easily publish content to one or multiple regions - as well as globally. A single, lean codebase allows for reduced operating costs and less duplication of effort in maintaining separate regional websites. SSO: The developer portal integrates with an internal SSO Identity Provider (IdP) and a separate external client SSO IdP alike. Staff users can automatically be granted appropriate role-based access via exposed attributes from the corporate SSO while new customers can register in the portal, creating an account in the external SSO and integrating with corporate identity and CRM flows. The solution delivered by Achieve Internet made it possible for developers and business units to access content, APIs, and products across global regions with a user interface personalized for their region in their native language. The Impact: 300% increase of their API catalog within the first 6 months The platform empowered Experian to continue their innovation and growth by easily supporting new regions, languages, and Apigee backends - all within a single, unified API portal. Within months, our client saw a significant increase in innovation across their business units. The new portal enables them to discover API products more easily, resulting in new product development and top-line revenue growth. The solution also has provided them with the framework to continue their global expansion while keeping costs low and increasing overall margins. Do you want to learn more about how Achieve Internet can do the same for your business? Reach out to our team today for a free consultation.

Several large enterprises are reaping the benefits of having their own Application Programming Interface (API) portal. API portals, or Developer portals, have grown way past the bottom-up thinking of developers posting code for other developers. Today’s modern API portal uses an outside-in approach that position APIs as products that are instrumental to the performance and growth of the enterprise. According to a report from McKinsey, despite APIs emerging as a unique part of many businesses today, most of these businesses have failed to build a fully functional API portal on their own. Improper business strategy is a significant factor in this failure. Poor maintenance practice, bad user interface (UI), and rushed development are other reasons. Start Thinking Enterprise Wide Many companies still look at an API portal as a function of IT, they trend towards building custom portals for their unique needs without a clear strategy of the needs of the API consumer. This bottom-up thinking leads to a choppy user experience, poor navigation and pure frustration to any visitor looking to evaluate the business opportunity of the API offering. The fact is, API ecosystems are expanding. Let’s not forget developers are the ultimate end user, yet in most cases today they’re the third or fourth representative from an organization to visit an API portal. A true outside-in approach to product development and UX is the only path to a productive API strategy which will lead to scalable revenue growth. In this article, we will take you through the reasons why you need an API portal and why you should think twice before asking your IT department to build the whole system from scratch. Why Do You Need An API Portal? A few years ago, a report by Harvard Business Review compared enterprises without an API to “the internet without the World Wide Web”. APIs have become the new gold mine for several industries to generate more revenue by providing their in-house data assets or expertise to the public. The number of APIs being published by enterprises is growing exponentially year over year. APIs help businesses create efficiencies, scale their product offerings and grow their customer base, leading to the ultimate goal of increased revenue. It has been estimated that nearly 31% of business revenue is generated via API or API-related integrations. According to a Salesforce report, several enterprises record a 54% increase in productivity when APIs are properly harnessed to drive business outcomes. Key elements to a modern-day API portal offer the following benefits: Large scaling product catalogs with advanced search capabilities Product Optimization, dividing API’s into groups for consumption Robust user-administration tools allowing for layers of permissions and the ability to group members into teams Communication features that build ecosystems, forums, FAQ’s videos, ect Integrations with SSO, CI/CD, RBAC and advance Analytics Multi tenant architecture for multiple API Gateways and API Management platforms Worldwide coverage through a multi instance architecture Monetization capabilities to fit the needs of the enterprise Things to Consider Before Building A Custom Developer Portal The number one mistake organizations make when preparing for an API Portal build is getting the correct stakeholders involved. The next misstep is forgetting to define the audience and the expected outcome. Finally, the largest fatal flaw is reverting back to the 90’s with the belief an API Portal is simply an informational website that anyone in the IT department can build in a weekend. Consider the following list before you embark on any custom API portal project. 1. Time to Market Serious consideration should be given to the amount of time it takes to build, support, and maintain an API portal. After you’ve defined your audience, grouped your API’s into products, architected the user experience and outlined all the internal and third-party integration points, you're now ready to choose a development platform. Of course, this doesn’t include the platform’s look and feel, content strategy, hosting, or even ongoing support. Many companies fall at the first hurdle, delaying their API program by as long as 24 months. 2. Know Your Audience Knowing your customer is important in any forward-facing website, application, or portal. If you still think you’re building for developers only, you’ve lost the race before the starting pistol ever fired. In today's market, where everyone is focused on digital transformation, it is much more likely that the evaluation of your API’s will happen by a business analyst or product manager looking for complementary data sets to expand their markets. The trend in today’s startup world is to mash up several different API’s to create disruptive applications. Take Uber as an example, it is said they rely on thousands of different API’s all over the world to provide real time mapping and driver to rider communications. 3. Build or Join an Ecosystem Implementing an API-based ecosystem without well-defined and measurable business objectives can result in low traction and disappointing ROI. Software engineering leaders must understand the business steps necessary to make the ecosystem successful — before they create one. In the article “To Create a Successful API-Based Ecosystem, Look Before You Leap” Gartner goes on to say “Ecosystems must meet clearly defined business objectives, such as improved retention or increased upsell revenue.” Is it better to join another ecosystem? If the answer is no, then it is important to understand there are a number of features that promote and nurture an ecosystem. Once the features are set, the next job is to build in the tools to properly moderate and promote communications within the community. 4. Integrations Do all your API’s go through one API Management Platform? Are all your API’s REST or do you have a wide variety of API’s that need to be added? Internal or external, public or gated, Partners only or open to the public? Access, SSO at what level? What about role-based access control (RBAC)? Do you have a plan for dividing your access into teams or by product offering? Or both? Are you planning on listing third party API’s to add to your ecosystem? If you have more than one source for API’s you need to make sure your API portal can support a multi tenant architecture. All of these items and more make this a portal and not simply a website that displays your API documentation. 5. Maintenance is not Support Finally your API portal needs to grow and adapt to a rapidly changing digital world. It’s not enough just to update your content and security patches. The API first or digital transformation is only in it’ infancy, your organization will be adding new API’s, creating new products groups, adding new business units, the demands to continue to innovate will never end. Building a custom portal means you need to stay up to date on those market changes and your portal will need to evolve. Not to mention the demands from your internal staff and executive teams, if 30% of your future business is going to come through your API program can you afford to build and forget? The Smarter Option to Custom An alternative path is to choose an enterprise-grade API portal vendor that can provide a much faster go-to-market strategy. A vendor that gives you well-tested API portal strategies with superior UX, established integration points, and advanced features that range from productization to managing and promoting an ecosystem. Learn more about Apiboost.

The era of web developers working in isolation behind the scenes is gone. Today, web development and APIs, in particular, are revenue generators, and the API Portal (or developer portal) is, in turn, a revenue generation hub. The API economy has come leaps and bounds in the past decade. eBay surpassed $1 billion in cumulative Gross Merchandise Bought (GMB) in 2019 through its Buy API. Twilio, a cloud communication API platform, generated $1.76 billion in 2020, a 55% year-over-year growth. Other notable signs of the growing API economy include Salesforce’s acquisition of MuleSoft and Visa’s acquisition of Plaid. In 2021, Mastercard acquired Ekata—a global identity verification API service—for $850 million. So what can we learn from this? The importance of APIs cannot be overstated for enterprises today. According to a 2020 Salesforce report, businesses generate 30% of their revenue through API or API-related implementations. The API market is also predicted to grow to 205B by 2023. (Google Search: How big is the API Market) . You may find yourself asking, do I need an API portal? The short answer to that is ‘yes'. There is a soaring demand for APIs to integrate and connect seamlessly to several applications and analytics software. The need for real-time insights makes APIs a must-have for many organizations today. APIs have become fundamental parts of several industries’ digital transformation; in fact, chances are that one or more of your operations rely on external APIs or have an API of their own. APIs encompass and connect various markets, applications, organizations, business stakeholders, API developers, and consumers. At the onset, there was a chasm between the decision-makers, marketers, and developers. This led to many unsuccessful projects and wasted effort because there was no proper communication or plan to build the API. Managing and building APIs is already challenging enough for several developers without worrying about marketing or making important business decisions. Conversely, it was also an even greater challenge for several non-technical people—marketers and business analysts—involved. API portals streamline the process and workflow between several API stakeholders by improving communication, collaboration, sharing, and development experience. Notably, it provides business and IT a place to engage, discuss, monitor, track, and collaborate around APIs they create. Who Interacts With An API Portal: Key Stakeholders Business Team Product owners: The product owners gather and present ideas for new API products or features. Business Analysts: Business analysts work with companies to help them improve their business processes. With easy access to your API portal, they can better evaluate the workflows, spot inefficiencies, and see potential revenue streams. Marketers and Salespeople: They help promote the API and develop the business strategies for the product. They also recruit partners for the API product. Digital Transformation Experts: Working in a similar way to business analysts, digital transformation experts are looking for ways to hone a company’s digital experience for employees, clients, and partners. Since your API portal should serve all of the above categories, user-friendliness for a non-technical digital transformation expert is vital. Developer Team API developers: Developers are responsible for building, publishing, and maintaining the APIs and their portal. Developer advocates: They bridge the gap between the developer community and the company. Technical Writers: Technical writers provide engaging, easy-to-understand content on the API and its usage. They also provide essential content to onboard and get new developers started on the API. API consumers: Application developers driving today's startup market. These experts are the heart of an ecosystem, driving innovation and empowering disruptive new ideas. Tracking API Success You should constantly monitor the effectiveness of your API strategy. A research carried out by Apigee identified a distinctive contrast between successful APIs and unsuccessful ones based on how integral their API success metrics—revenue and consumption metrics— are to them. What if you already have an API? You need to monitor and track its progress. You should track some of these API metrics: ROI, direct and indirect revenue, and CLTV for every developer. You should also monitor the API traffic and usage metrics to improve your decision on which API method is the most popular. Why is it popular? What location is my API accessed from? Developers have to be on-hand to suggest changes based on their developer community engagements, churn, NPS, or documentation engagement. Solutions may include adding a new use case for a new programming language, improving some methods, or extending its features. The operations team needs to check and monitor API traffic patterns and other operational metrics like error and uptime and know when new resources or critical changes are needed. Marketing to Developers Developers want to build and improve their skills. If your platform has few use cases or outdated with little to no updates, developers will reject your platform. Keep in mind that a developer's marketability depends on the latest technology or skills they acquire. Developers align themselves with APIs that provide a wide range of support for the most applicable standards. It’s important to know that developers are practical people. Their motivations stem from solving a particular problem, improving efficiency, or helping propel their career forward. How do API portals solve this problem? The real value to a developer is speed. Access to the original developers through forums and chat makes getting additional information easy. What really makes their journey go faster is when an API Portal is sectioned off into easy to navigate API products, broken out into categories and product lines. This is commonly referred to as Teams, helping the developer find what they need without scrolling through hundreds of poorly named API’s. Marketing to Business Units Developers aren’t the only stakeholders that need to be marketed to. Every division in your company needs to understand the business value of integrating APIs into your value chain. However, culture and institutional inertia may be hurdles to the API economy. Pushing the adoption of APIs without clearly defining and articulating the business value of APIs will only create more friction and resistance to the process. Plus, as processes and operations become less siloed, and cross-team collaboration becomes the norm, understanding the value of APIs is more critical than ever. Productizing APIs can help business units understand their importance. For example, by presenting APIs as products that can help fulfill particular business needs and by sharing successful use cases, companies can showcase APIs from a perspective that’s appealing to each business unit. Another challenge when it comes to marketing APIs is understanding the tech speak of the original developer. Marketers are never going to read eight to ten different API docs to understand the dependencies for obtaining their needs. Grouping API’s into Products will make it clear to a business analyst that you need to obtain keys for three specific API to unlock the value of the data. On the flip side, grouping API’s into products exposes the business folks to more of your APIs, ultimately leading to revenue scale. Building a Developer Community According to Apigee, over 75% of top-quartile companies believe that developer programs and community investments improve their success rate compared to less than 50% of companies in the lower-quartile. It is no longer enough to build and implement an API. You want to have a community that actively showcases, promotes, and engages with your API products. Say you have an API; one problem you’d face is trying to solve all customer issues on your own. As they say, experience is the best teacher. When you engage and solve issues for your developers, they will be on hand to nurture and help other developers facing similar challenges. A developer community can be a chat portal, Slack, Discord, and developer forums to engage and interact with each other. Other channels you can use are newsletters and developer blogs. You can also connect and engage with developers through social media or developer advocates. Hackathons, conference booths, and events for your community are also great ways of engaging with developers. You need to look at the different ways to attract, retain, and promote engagement on your API. How Modern API Portals Bridge The Gap Between Business and IT Aligning both IT and business units might not prove an easy task, yet the potential of APIs has the power to build a bridge between these two seemingly irreconcilable units. For both teams to collaborate and thrive together, C-suite executives need to drive cultural and organizational adjustments. Without that bridge, the chances of success for your digital transformation process are grim. Whether your company is just embarking on an API strategy journey or is already pushing out APIs and looking to align stakeholders, measure success, and better engage consumers, Achieve Internet has the tools and the expertise to help you bridge the gap and walk you through the process. With the help of a robust API portal offering like APIBoost, you can build an API portal that supports and manages your APIs and creates an ecosystem that aligns every stakeholder. Find out more about how APIs can support your business here: API Portal Buyer's Guide.

API strategy is at the core of many digital transformation roadmaps. Key to the success of these plans is the adoption of the API strategy both internally and externally through an API portal. Adoption can be across many persona types as companies reach for ROI in new revenue streams, operating efficiencies, innovation or all of the above. The ability to allow groups to work together in teams with appropriate access to what they need or are contractually obligated becomes a critical tool for speed and security. Teams is the function on a portal for the administrators and product owners to give access to APIs and Apps to specific people and manage their experience within a micro environment on an API Portal. Teams Personas and Roles: Most common personas/roles for the use of a teams strategy on an API Porta are the Product Owner, Team Admin, and Team Member. By adding this functionality and these roles, you can control many variations of groups of people working together on applications and precise access and documentation to the APIs that are needed. It's important to note that the Team Admin and the team members are doing all of their work on the front end of the portal and usually this is supported by authentication through single sign on. The Product Owner role is working in the administrative section of the digital solution and has access to all the products and front-end space assigned to that product line. Examples of Groups that can leverage working in Teams. Sample Business Cases for working in Teams: Eco-System Revenue: Allowing customers, partners and even competitors to integrate your vital offerings into their ecosystem can introduce new revenue streams. The Finance industry is aggressively exposing their API products into other industries and emerging Fintech start-ups. Teams can help these partners and customers grow with the speed of digital transformation in global banking. Insurance is also working towards leveraging their API strategy to bridge their product sales to white label environments and non-traditional consumer audiences. I recently worked with an identity protection division that needed to leverage teams resell protection services with a national warehouse chain. They leveraged teams to allow the developers of the warehouse business to access the APIs needed to white label those services while integrating in the identity protection infrastructure. Teams access to products. Innovation: Speed and access are critical for technical and product innovation strategies. Innovation may be global adoption, cross-team development, internal, external and a mix of these. Keeping your APIs available to the right people, maintaining secure governance over their availability while managing the product life cycle of the APIs can easily become a challenge via role-based access only. Allowing these varying roles to work together in teams where they only see their apps, documentation and API products available to the teams they are on is an efficient way to have many levels of access on a single API portal. For example, many enterprise companies have internal departments that need highly controlled access to their APIs (ie. human resources, security or regulated customer data) both internally and externally. Teams functionality allows the product owner of the sensitive products to assign team membership and product access. They are also able to tightly manage the credentials, product content and review innovation progress to move the application through development, staging and into production. Analytics for Teams Applications Efficiency: As Covid changed how people interfaced with companies, customer service improvements, seamless vendor integrations, and internal cross-department collaboration has become critical. Whether its B2B or B2C, getting products and services ordered, prepared and delivered using automation is no longer a long-term initiative. Working in teams can increase the speed of which internal and external developers can work together to create new processes to conduct business. Vendors and customers are using customized team environments to send and capture orders, status, logistics and reports. Internal processes can also have a large impact on an organization in surprising ways. Improvements in manufacturing and logistics are top of mind, but there are other less obvious uses that are being exposed as companies move forward with their API life cycle. For example, energy companies are finding inventive ways to monitor and deploy preventative maintenance that saves millions and improve response times. Since this is often highly regulated, managing access and security via a team is efficient and can be easily monitored and logged. Closing: Working in teams can help your organization grow safely and effectively with all of the availability and adoption that a well-organized API Portal can provide. Achieve Internet and APIBoost have ready to market API Portals with a full-set of teams and product owner features. If you would like to reach out for a discussion about specific challenges to your industry and business we are happy to help. Contact Us today!

It's an exciting time for organizations that have valuable IT assets in place and are seeing the opportunity to expand their revenue streams through those assets. Vibrant API offerings that leverage in-house data and skill sets are particularly enticing. A few years ago, McKinsey predicted that as much as $1 trillion in global economic profit would be up for grabs through the redistribution of revenues that APIs have put into play. As such, there are many opportunities to provide narrowly tailored but competent services across sectors and monetize those services. The number of organizations with mature API strategies remains small. Most offerings are just a dozen or so APIs instead of the hundreds needed for a robust portfolio. Most companies do not have any mature API strategy, and upper management is still largely unaware of the growth opportunities and margins available from monetizing their API portfolio. If you are an early mover in this field, how do you get other departments on board (especially the C-suite) with a robust API monetization strategy? How can you promote internal adoption? An API or developer portal is your gateway to monetizing your API offerings. Demonstrating lower TCO and higher ROI by adopting an API portal for your API offerings is a strong starting point to changing your organization’s culture regarding API strategy. ROI on the Path to Monetization: 3 Non-monetary Returns of an API Portal An API portal can generate returns in a number of ways, but before we speak about monetary returns, let’s delve into the indirect benefits and returns on investment you can find along the way to monetization. 1. Enabling Development and Innovation The form of returns you can rely on, is the enablement of developers to do what they do best; Build and innovate. Without a centralized developer portal with a catalog, advanced search functions, and tools for communication and collaboration, developers will struggle to find the documentation and APIs they need to build quickly and efficiently. 2. Streamlining Partnerships and Integrations With your APIs, documents, assets, stored and presented centrally, partners of all types will find it easier to work with your technology. Integrations between your technology and third-parties will also hit the market faster. 3. Bridging the Gap Between Business and IT With the right social tools in place, an API portal can be a hub for innovation as well as a bridge for communication between departments. Modern API portals (unlike legacy developer portals NOTE: link to Dev portals vs API portals here) are not built exclusively for the IT department to use. On the contrary, a well-designed API portal enables business users to expand their client base and explorer new markets driven by the start up community. A great example of this is the Fintech industry reshaping the insurance and banking markets. ROI with Monetization: APIs Open Up New Approaches to Expanding Revenue API monetization is becoming an important concept as we move through 2021. Major players, like Red Hat and Google, have started talking in-depth about generating revenue for the use of your APIs rather than through traditional software offerings. IT departments are shifting to revenue-generating roles in organizations, and away from being sunk cost centers simply supporting other business units. While most CEOs and boards still share that view — 80% of IT resources and budget are spent on running the business and only 20% on growing the business — nearly half now view IT as a revenue generator instead of a cost-center. A robust IT effort focused on monetizable API offerings usually improves the overall innovation happening within an organization. Keys to success in the effort involve modernizing the internal processes and workflows that developers touch during their work, affecting the entire IT operation. Customer bases are widened as opportunities to use APIs across sectors are recognized - often by customers independent of your internally identified niches. The SaaS business model, which Gartner predicts could generate up to $121 billion in revenue in 2021 is heavily dependent on reselling third-party API offerings in tailored service packages for various niches. This makes it the hottest niche of entrepreneurial activity in the world economy today. API Portals Improve Both Sides of the Ledger Having robust API offerings, a monetization strategy for them, and gathering documentation and instructions for using the APIs in a central location are the first steps to leveraging the revenue opportunities sleeping in your IT department. But for the money to come, your offerings have to be attractive to developers and drive awareness and understanding of your organization’s product line. An API or developer portal provides a better overall developer experience and increases engagement than ad hoc aggregations of API documentation and access instructions, improving your bottom line. They simplify the onboarding of new developers and allow developers to work more efficiently by putting everything they need in one place. An API portal enables exploration, encouraging the adoption of additional products while maintaining data security, access, and permission levels. And they provide structure for all of a company’s API offerings, reducing silos in the organization and providing a consistent interface to access offerings. How A Top U.S. Insurance Company Benefits from its API Portal This U.S. based insurance giant is one company that benefits daily from a forward-thinking and globally connected API portal. Prior to working with Apigee along with Achieve Internet, this insurance carrier had a number of challenges that they needed to overcome, including: A lack of visibility and adoption of APIs internally and externally. A resource heavy service model for their Roadside Assistance program with an absence of activities that drive efficiency, cost savings and new revenue opportunities. A shortage of technical talent to successfully create and support a Drupal developer portal. A limited understanding of how Apigee Edge can be optimized. These issues were driving up costs, stifling the user experience, and stunting revenue growth. But together with the team at Achieve Internet, an Apigee Edge and Drupal-certified partner, they were able to achieve four key outcomes that optimizes workflows, lowers their costs, saves them time, and secures the future of their development ecosystem: A Streamlined Developer Experience: With the right technical support in place, the company, along with its external partners and internal developers, began to see the developer experience streamlined and improved. This resulted in a 181% increase in digital engagement across the business. The developer portal was also significantly improved, allowing developers quick access to their API’s with clear documentation accelerating innovation. Speed on the Ground: With Achieve Internet’s Apigee and Drupal experts, they can stay focused on their core business of improving their customer’s roadside service experience by getting them the help they need in an expedited fashion while increasing capacity (over 2,000,000 digital rescues) and reducing costs (approximately $3,000,000 cost savings). Expert Support: Their smooth transition to Achieve Internet for support allows them to focus on the bigger picture while experts connect the dots behind the scenes and sustain their award-winning user experience. Company-wide Adoption: The success with the Apigee platform has resulted in adoption across the enterprise. Multiple divisions are now collaborating with Achieve Internet to create the API first digital transformation the InsureTech space requires. Accelerate Your API Program with Apiboost Apiboost is an advanced full-featured API portal platform that is ready to be tailored to your needs, helping developers utilize your APIs quickly and easily. Apiboost features robust formatting tools for creating and maintaining API documentation. Developer sandboxing provides development and testing in an isolated environment. Apiboost is designed from the ground up for cross-department collaboration, with flexible zones in the portal layout for marketing messaging. The platform has native support for Google Apigee, and supports other API management solutions through integrations. In addition, Apiboost provides the management of users, groups, and teams to publish and limit access to the APIs they should see based on authentication. Ready to start generating revenue from your APIs? Learn how Apiboost can help you.

Attracting developers and more importantly, their organizations, to your API’s isn’t just about providing API documentation and an authentication key. While senior management make most final buying decisions for SaaS products, Clutch reports that “most businesses rely on groups of younger, digital-savvy employees to research and evaluate B2B companies”. Reaching this group, especially when they are comprised mostly of developers, is a challenge facing many companies today. Recognition of the importance of attracting an active and enthusiastic developer community around a company’s API products is growing. New roles are emerging, like developer evangelists who bridge marketing and development groups in a company and who seek to build dev communities around a company’s API products. New approaches to offering developers access to resources are rapidly gaining speed – putting up API documentation doesn’t matter if no one knows they exist. The 4 Keys to Attracting and Retaining Developers Developers need to know that your API exists. To make sure developers find their APIs, businesses are expanding their outreach through social media, creating informative content, reaching out to larger developer communities like Stack Overflow, Hacker News, and Reddit, and building developer advocacy groups within their organization. Developers want API products that meet their needs, helping improve the products they’re working to build. Thus, by focusing on usability and intuitiveness you increase the chances of your API offering being taken by and grown by third-party developers. Developers want to be a part of a community. Developing software can be isolating and the rapid evolution in the industry creates great pressure on developers to keep up. There’s a strong ethos among developers to help each other, and an effective community can leverage the work of a small number of staff developer advocates into a community supporting hundreds or thousands of API customers. But most importantly, developers need a great experience using your API. If signing up is difficult, authentication is a barrier, documentation is hard to use or incomplete, terms of use are unclear, or there is little transparency in your offerings concerning restrictions and availability status, you’ll likely alienate developers quickly. Past these basics, developers need a space that has the resources they need to build great and innovative products. That’s where API portals come in. Why is Marketing to Developers Challenging? Driven by the need to stay up to date and informed in the face of an onslaught of content, developers are nearly immune to conventional marketing-speak. Developers must filter an enormous amount of information to be effective in their jobs. The entire discipline is evolving at a torrential pace. While there are best practices, rules of thumb, and favored software products, the most effective answer to most problems is far from settled. In the past, targeted ads and sponsored search results generated leads with buying intent that could be turned over to the sales team to pursue. Trade show booths and freebies often succeeded in getting sign-ups. But the software-as-a-service marketplace has become much more competitive. Paid approaches are now most useful as a top-of-funnel technique to attract developers, who often make the buying decision for API offerings, to technical conferences, webinars, content, and newsletters that can help educate developers to the compelling arguments for adopting a given API solution from the sea of alternatives. The problem with paid approaches is that they don't address developer needs in an effective way. Developers want to build their skills, deliver innovative products, gain recognition, and to get paid for their work. Tools including API offerings are a means to those ends. The marketplace is providing help to companies in winning developer mind-share and buy-in. The role of developer advocate is relatively new and can offer personalized engagement on a technical level with developers, helping to leverage communities around a company’s products. Developer communities themselves are being fostered through company Slack, Teams, or Discord channels, and branded discussion forums both in-house and in communities like Reddit. Support is an increasing area of focus, holding developer’s hands as they have questions and raise concerns. Social media is an important venue for providing technical support. API portals are the gateway to educating developers about the resources available to them when using a company’s API offerings – from easy access to support, links to communities, announcements and feature road maps, documentation, code sandboxes to allow exploration of the APIs, working code examples, to app galleries highlighting creative and innovative work being done with the platform. Why is a Great Developer Experience Worth Investing In? In many traditional IT departments, developer workflow lacks autonomy on the part of engineers. Team leads and management vet work tickets for bugs or new features and flesh out most of the key details necessary to perform the work. Communication mostly concerns clarifying details about the work to be done. Developers have little transparency into the rest of the business and little opportunity to interact with other departments. Business metrics and KPIs aren’t considered relevant to the tasks at hand for development staff. In contrast, many top of the line organizations are creating real value for their businesses from leveraging their development staff. Developers are given autonomy and decision-making responsibilities, and their compensation is often tied to the success of the company through equity sharing. They are being given the incentive to look at the big picture of their organization, solve any problem they see, and question whether a feature request even makes sense to offer within the context of a company’s strategy. In order for developers to return maximum value to their organizations, they need to be able to move fast and not break things. API growth is exploding, but the number of capable developers is not. A great developer experience with low friction gets developers started quickly with API offerings and keeps them invested with a particular vendor as their usage level grows. A professional and polished API portal is a key ingredient in attracting and maintaining a developer base, both internal and external, for a company’s API offerings. How Are Best-of-Class API Portals Doing It? An API portal that creates real business value begins with an easy to use way for updating the portal. Many of the problems solved by an API portal vs manual efforts that maintain the pieces separately are content related and similar to the core features of an extensible CMS. The portal is a powerful web application with deep features that are attractive to developers. Maintaining brand consistency for API offerings is one advantage of an API portal. It’s easy for an organization to see their API offerings grow and spread widely across their product groups, siloed into various ad hoc portals with little coordination between them. By managing a central gateway with a tailored approach, the pieces of all API offerings can be gathered in one place. Documents, guides, tutorials, videos, SDKs, code examples, and feature announcements can be standardized and made easily available, creating an easy on-ramp for your developer community. Code sandboxes for experimentation, support, uptime and scheduled downtime analytics, service terms and acceptable uses, app galleries, community forums, and communication channels like Slack or Teams accounts can all be included in one accessible location. An API portal can serve different regions and appeal to developers in those regions, and service different groups of users. Also, the portal can be tailored for internal development staff, partners, and public users. We’ve explored the opportunities that a great developer experience creates in expanding revenue opportunities. A central and richly featured portal helps unearth new and innovate applications for a company’s API services, deepening the product bench and multiplying income streams. Accelerate Your API Program with APIBoost APIBoost is an advanced full-feature API portal platform that is ready to be tailored to your needs. It’s the foundation for a great API portal, helping devs reach your API easily and get started quick and easy. APIBoost offers powerful formatting and presentation for your API documentation, a Try it Out developer sandbox, and flexible zones for marketing messaging. APIBoost supports API management integrations and is Google Apigee ready out of the box. The platform supports multiple API documentation formats including WSDL, manual documentation uploads, and an easy to use admin area for managing both large and small offerings. Learn how APIBoost can help you.

Security has become a major headache when it comes to APIs - there’s a reason Gartner says APIs will become the “most frequent attack vector” by 2022. At Achieve Internet, we work with companies across multiple industries and of various sizes to assist them in realizing the technical and business benefits of deploying API management programs. We work with our clients to employ best practices around API development, foundational services, efficient CI/CD processes, and most importantly, security. Many times, we are engaged with a client that is either mid-project or already in production. In both instances, the client is experiencing difficulty understanding how to configure and/or maintain the management platform to best-practice standards, resulting in deployments that are not fully secure. Below are the top security oversights we encounter on a consistent basis: Security Configuration - The most common scenario we encounter with customers who are new to API Management platforms centers around optimum security and authentication configuration. The leading gateways have robust security capabilities that can be implemented in a manner that greatly reduces vulnerabilities across the enterprise digital ecosystem. Additionally, best practices around API key management, password standards, and access token validation are all common oversights. Many times, these capabilities are only partially or erroneously deployed on an ad hoc basis without an overarching security plan due to a lack of internal knowledge of the management platform's security features. API Development - Not unrelated to configuration, best practices around API Development are paramount to security. In the optimal situation, the API Management Platform can remove a majority of the burden surrounding security off of individual developers and onto standardized security policies enforced by the management program in accordance with a clearly defined API Governance Plan. Additionally, the creation of an “API Styleguide” which can serve as a quick reference for development teams defines the requirements and expectations when building new or modifying existing APIs, as well as reinforcing best practices. Continuous Security Testing - Given the velocity of change enabled by efficient CI/CD processes and dynamism of API development and refinement in general, the “traditional” once or twice-yearly penetration testing no longer suffices. Achieve engineers are frequently asked, “How do I ensure all of the new APIs we are introducing, with inevitable modifications, are constantly monitored for vulnerabilities?”. As recently as a year ago, the solution to this issue was difficult to find. Luckily, new SaaS-based security platforms allow for penetration testing on-demand and are even able to decipher the business logic of an API for enhanced screening. Additionally, these platforms can also be integrated into CI/CD pipelines to scan for and report any vulnerabilities before production deployment without any intervention needed by the developer or information security team. API Management Platform Maintenance - Another common security issue Achieve frequently encounters, especially with private cloud/on-premise deployments, is caused by non-existant or only partially completed maintenance activities. The typical symptom of this occurring for a client is the “mysterious” failure of a critical feature or function. When this happens, Achieve is engaged in a platform “health check” to evaluate all of the complex components of the management platform and verity the OS and platform are up to date, caches are being cleared, and routine maintenance is being completed on a regular basis. Often, the biggest threat to security is associated with running an outdated, and potentially unsupported, version of the API management platform or not applying OS security patches and version updates. While the above is not an exhaustive list, evaluating your API Management Platform and surrounding environment against these common oversights will lead to a more secure and efficient experience for customers, internal development teams, vendors, and business stakeholders alike. Want more insights into securing your APIs? Join us for our webinar on “How to Incorporate API Security into the Development Cycle” on February 25th!