The biggest impact APIs will have at your company will be the internal, cultural change regarding how you do business. We are in the middle of an explosion of APIs, and while there are many new public APIs emerging, the majority of growth is coming from the deployment of internal APIs.
There is a lot that companies can learn from the open API movement over the last fourteen years, with many building blocks, and healthy practices that can be applied when internally deploying APIs.
This is a topic I will be exploring on API Evangelist, and at the IBM Impact conference at the Venetian in Las Vegas, NV—April 27th through May 1st. The abstract from my talk, titled "Business of Internal APIs” is:
The largest area of growth in the last couple years of APIs is internally within the enterprise. There are numerous lessons that can be extracted from the world of public APIs, and applied internally within any company, helping increase agility, efficiency, while also helping develop new business lines. When it comes to APIs, the secret to success isn’t all about technology, and this session will help introduce you to the business of internal APIs, extracted from the approach of leaders in the space.
In my experience there are fundamental elements that make APIs successful, where more classic approaches like service oriented architecture (SOA) fall short. When companies are deploying APIs for internal consumption, you have to consider elements like self-service access, up to date API docs, code samples, and the human elements, that have made public API deployments successful.
Even though internal APIs consumers will have some unique needs that your partner or public API consumers won't, there will also be many similar patterns across your internal, partner and public API customers that you will need to leverage. If you can’t be in Vegas at the end of the month to hear me talk, just tune into API Evangelist and I’ll make sure I publish everything online for consumption by all my readers.
