API strategy

This post, part of a guest blog series on platform success strategies, originally appeared on Programmableweb.com.

With the baseball season now in full swing, the NBA playoffs underway and the Stanley Cup playoffs right around the corner, it is an exciting time for sports.  And for sports APIs.  In the past few months, there have been a number of exciting events that have brought sports data and sports APIs to center stage.

Photo of Victoria Barret (Left) and Wendy Lea (Right) speaking at The Business of APIs conference in San Francisco last Fall. 

Wendy Lea fell in love with the idea of creating, driving and connecting the meaningful conversations between companies and their customers.

She found a home doing that as the CEO of Get Satisfaction, a community-based platform that helps companies engage with their customers and in turn, gain product insight and enhanced customer loyalty.

APIs play a huge role in the B2C arena. For example, a retail API allows access to pricing data, product catalog, support and purchases.  These outward APIs ease the creation of apps, integrations, and robust consumer experiences.  Not to mention the ability to track usage and see trends with API management.

Every large enterprise periodically accumulates what we call "tech debt". It happens even in very well-run companies, those that have built-in processes designed to adapt quickly to capitalize on emerging opportunities, or cope with unexpected problems. In essence, to respond rapidly to these and other market shifts, they have to implement new technologies. Then, with the next shift, they have to do it all over again, basically starting from scratch each time.

Several lucky Masherites, including me, got to spend last Thursday and Friday at the API Strategy & Practice Conference in New York City.

For those of us who live in cities, transportation networks are vital to our day-to-day activities.  Since I don’t have a car, I am wholly reliant on New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA).   Thank god they have an API.

This post, part of a guest blog series on platform success strategies, originally appeared on Programmableweb.com

To round out my discussion of enterprise API strategy, I want to focus on how enterprise’s can use APIs for internal usage.  I have already discussed how enterprises can benefit from exposing some of their data to the general public as well as customers and partners.  Those are the standard target audiences for API programs. 

The Yellow Pages Group (YPG) has experienced an incredible journey from phonebook supplier to online communications and marketing giant. And since releasing an API, the Canadian company and its business partners continue to enjoy even more growth.

Large companies have been a part of the API game from the start.  Ebay and Amazon have had APIs since the early 2000’s.  And now, more and more enterprises are developing API programs.   Large companies in industries as varied as retail (BestBuy), hardware (Cisco) and distribution (Coca-Cola Enterprises) are all creating successful API programs. 

Last week, Mashery Platform Strategy Director, Chuck Freedman, wrote about a few strategies to help your API platform achieve its business goals.  This is part two of that post, covering strategies 4-6 from Chuck’s Business of APIs talk, which he presented earlier this fall. 

4.  Establishing Effective Partner Engagement

Companies that back their API offering with a strategic approach can experience a measurable success. We guide companies with existing and new APIs to understand their business goals and implement or create strategies that drive success.

About 122 million Americans are expected to shop online today, otherwise known as Cyber Monday, according to Shop.org, the digital division of The National Retail Federation, which coined the phrase in 2005. 

Mapping, geo-location and location-based services (LBS) have been at the center of platform activity since web APIs began emerging over 7 years ago.  Launching maps APIs at Yahoo! in 2005, and then writing a book about them the following year, it was clear to me that mapping was the gateway for a generation of developers integrating more than one API.