API Marketplace as a Business Platform

From a marketing perspective, Innovation in Software has already hit its ceiling making it really hard to invent something new that could generate business value. As a result, a new era has begun for the communities of stakeholders of a particular industry to work together in forming new businesses based on combinations of ideas coming from software, hardware, business and marketing professionals. In other words—engaging in a journey towards Digital Transformation—professionals who represent different domains have started to work together in synergy to invent new businesses through technology rather than using technology to facilitate their existing businesses. In this article, we expect to discuss "API Marketplace" which is a concept that helps to form business-platforms for inventing new businesses utilising existing capabilities of organisations.

Apparently, discovering new grounds, in general, isn't a new concept even though there are strategic differences based on in which context it had been applied in history. Pioneers who utilised their existing capabilities, expertise and experience to discover new grounds naturally became and believed to be the leaders.

Today, the concept of Digital Transformation can be seen as the ultimate strategy of revealing new grounds in the context of businesses. In other words, an organisation—that has developed a certain set of domain-expertise, execution-capabilities and experience—is capable of becoming a version of Ragnar Lothbrok in the context of businesses, thanks to the concept of Digital Transformation.

The above diagram depicts how a typical organisation that has developed their execution-capabilities, information-base, expertise & experience over the time would discover new businesses for a completely new market from what they had been offering their products & services for. Being equipped with these elements, such organisations use Technology as their "Karves" today to reach their destination in the journey of Digital Transformation.

Forming new businesses and markets essentially targets new groups or categories of people. In other words, the involvement of any potential stakeholder group has become what matters the most when discovering new grounds in the context of businesses. Also, the involvement and interests of different groups of potential stakeholders bring creativity that helps innovation!

Connectivity through technology is what we see in a regular routine wherever we travel today. But when thinking of building a base-layer-framework to facilitate that connectivity using technology, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) come into the picture as the ultimate choice! This is the main reason that many organisations have started to build API Management platforms in such an aggressive manner within hard project delivery deadlines.

However, our Topic in this study doesn't limit itself to just Connectivity via Technology, rather it consists of many other factors such as People (Stakeholders), Creativity, new Businesses & markets. Therefore, we will be discussing how API Marketplaces connects different groups of stakeholders and bring creativity/innovation in forming new businesses by acting as a Business Platform at the same time.

Use case

In theory, the API Marketplace concept may apply to many different scenarios in today industries and organisations. However, for the sake of delivering a practical understanding, let's narrow the scope for a chosen scenario that would apply to many industries.

Let's assume that your organisation expect to deal with one of the below-given situations.

• Merger with another Company
• Company Acquisition
• Partners' owning different kind of systems
• Different departments owning siloed systems

These cases typically involve requirements of integration between and among different systems and technical infrastructure. For the purpose of optimization, efficient resource utilisation and better governance of the capabilities delivered by such different systems, the concept of API management is adopted by many organisations.

The moment you build a mechanism to connect different stakeholder groups with such an API Management platform, that creates a potential of changing the flow of the wind for your sail towards new business grounds.

The mechanism is "API Marketplace"; and what you create with it is "Business Platform" for all different parties to create new businesses on top of it!

The above picture shows how the entities of the same example forms and internal stakeholder community and proceed with API publishing and governance while allowing external stakeholder communities to utilise these APIs for implementing technological products based on their own ideas. This also indicates how Feedback is obtained from all the communities in order to make continuos improvements which would ideally be made following an Iterative Approach.

Promote participation

Having a properly implemented feedback-cycle is a crutial component in this business as it promotes participation. Promoting participation itself encourages creativity and innovation, which is the key differentiator in pioneering! Also, when you build a (business) platform for different parties to demonstrate their talents utilising the facilities which you provide, they naturally feel themselves to be important roles in the business. This also encourages them investing their time and other resources with full confidence in order to help the business which benefits both parties mutually.

For example, just imagine the days that you cheered for some singer who performed on a stage—being just one of those thousands of fans who hardly became a target of any spotlights. It was exactly similar to a "Pipe-business" scenarios where you remained just as the one to consume a certain product/services that some manufacture produces. You always was the one to pay and obtain stuff and your ideas or opinions hardly mattered in that business.

The business of "Business-Platforms" is like a modern reality show—participation is highly encouraged and your opinion, talent and creativity matter are respected in that context. You are provided with the option of stealing the soptlight and also with the option of earning the golden-buzzer! This mutually benefits both the participant and the owner of the platform building new audiences in different markets!

But remember! You can help new stars to be born and rewarded with the golden-buzzer! But, when you own the platform—you always will remain being The Boss in that picture!

Kick your "ideas" off with Evaluation

I believe that you have got the idea behind building API Marketplaces to form Business-Platforms. But it is also important for you to have a place to see this in action so that you could evaluate your ideas in a much pragmatic approach. Fortunately, there is place which you could actually see this in action and try out the typical features and capabilites that would/should be provided on a comprehensive API Marketplace!

WSO2 Public API Cloud is a hosted & managed version of WSO2 API Manager product which you could use for both business and evaluation purpose. Once you log in to the WSO2 API Cloud, the experiece that get will be the experience that you would facilitate your internal and external stakeholders with, once you formed your API Marketplace.