API management - what's the business case?

Computing discusses the merits of API management with top UK IT leaders and CA Technologies

API management - or the idea of publishing application programming interfaces in a secure, scalable environment to the internet - has been touted as the next big thing for a few years now, but what, exactly is the business case for it?

Computing aimed to find out at our second IT Leaders' Club supper held at the Shangri-La Hotel, The Shard, London, where we invited 12 of the UK's top IT leaders to discuss the topic alongside CA Technologies, who sponsored the event. The event was held under Chatham House rules, which means most of the quotes below are unattributed.

During the evening, our guests enjoyed the stunning view, a delicious three-course meal and a fulsome debate about API management, during which Computing presented its recent research into the subject.

The discussion kicked off with Chris Rowett, global VP of continuous delivery at CA explaining the case for APIs in the context of the vital need for digital transformation projects to focus on customer experience.

"Digital transformation is about how we can provide outstanding customer experience - and it's not a speed conversation, it's a speed with quality conversation. It's not just about automation, it's about improving processes - if you just automate existing software development processes you'll have a problem even faster [than you currently do]," he said.

Rowett said organisations aren't moving faster because technologies have allowed them to do so, but because people are demanding it of them.

"In the 1990s we had a web revolution and now we have a multi-channel digital revolution; we demand those things. There are a few Ubers out there that define the art of the possible but the problem is their reality is not our reality - because they don't have a 100 years of legacy that you have to deal with. We're trying to act like them in the market because that's the new normal," he said.

Step forward APIs

Ian Clark, senior director, EMEA API management solutions at CA, argued that APIs help organisations to deliver the experience that their customers are now looking for.

For its research, Computing asked IT decision makers whether they had a clear strategy in place for API management: 19 per cent of respondents said yes, 31 per cent said no, and, surprisingly, 50 per cent said they weren't sure.

So do IT leaders need a strategy for API management?

One of our guests, a CIO from a financial services firm, said that their company didn't have an API management strategy, and questioned what is exactly meant by the term "API".

"All of a sudden it's a buzzword. To me, API means accessibility and connecting apps to clients and others. Now, I've got some legacy apps that I can't put out to a mobile app because one doesn't talk to the other, so I've got an API-type layer. So is that an API strategy? Well, not really, because I need to provide that service [regardless]," they said.

However, they added that the company is now beginning to consider whether it needs a formal strategy for APIs to improve the way it presents services to the "big wide world".

An IT leader of an e-commerce firm suggested that their company did not need API management as it is currently "slashing through all of our components to make them as fine-grained as possible", adding that an API management layer would add unnecessary complexity.

But Clark suggested that other companies - particularly those running a lot of legacy technology - would find an API management layer to be more of a benefit than a hindrance.

"When you have legacy [technology], web services built up over many years, they don't lend themselves to this world of mobility, so this abstraction layer is there to mediate between what you have built on... SOA and those sorts of things," he said.

API management - what's the business case?

Computing discusses the merits of API management with top UK IT leaders and CA Technologies

Clark suggested that API management can also help companies keep on top of service levels and quotas.

"Presumably your APIs have resource constraints behind them, they have a limit, they have a maximum headroom and clearly you don't want things like denial of service if requests to services get flooded," he said.

But the IT leader of the e-commerce company said that API management was merely a solution to a non-existent problem.

However, an IT director at a UK retail organisation, said that API management was crucial for them as it helped it to interface with its customers, and move away from the "old school" way of doing things.

"I've put in [an API management solution]... we are now doing things in a more API-driven way, internally and externally. But the most important thing for us is that it helps us to [engage] with a new customer because for us it's [necessary] to plug in the customer... We've seen that go from a 10-day process to effectively a six-hour process, and that's just over the course of the past few weeks while we've been going through the pilot," the IT director said.

They added that security and bandwidth throttling are other areas that need to be considered from an API perspective.

"There's a live example where we have a customer who is basically polling data from us. We had to call them up and say you need to stop doing this because you're affecting our services - but with API management we can control that," they said.

Highlighting another benefit of API management, they said: "It allows us to say ‘OK, here's a bunch of standard stuff, customers you can actually self-service', and we can start to scale this out in terms of common services where all we have to do is present APIs to whatever that service is that we want customers to plug into."

To find out more about the IT Leaders' Club get in touch with Paul Harvey on +44 207 316 9796 or [email protected].