API-fication: Core Building Block of The Digital Enterprise
API-fication: Core Building Block of The Digital Enterprise
com
API-fication
Core Building Block of the
Digital Enterprise
AUTHORS
Charu Rudrakshi, Principal Architect, DSI
Amit Varshney, Solution Director, DSI
Bharath Yadla, Associate Vice President, DSI
Dr. Rama Kanneganti, Fellow
Kiran Somalwar, VicePresident, MAPI & DSI
TABLE OF CONTENTS
DIGITAL ENTERPRISES 3
API - A CORE BUILDING BLOCK OF A DIGITAL BUSINESS 4
APIs DEFINED 5
HOW APIs BENEFIT ENTERPRISES 6
WHAT ENTERPRISES ARE DOING WITH APIs 6
API PLATFORMS 7
CONSUMER APPS 8
FLEXIBLE & LIGHTWEIGHT API 9
ENTERPRISE GRADE API 9
LOW COST API 9
CUSTOM-BUILT PLATFORMS AS AN ALTERNATIVE 9
API PLATFORM ENABLEMENT 9
OUR APPROACH 10
API LANDSCAPE AND DISCOVERY 10
API CONCEPTION AND DEFINITION 10
ARCHITECTURE AND IMPLEMENTATION 11
MANAGEMENT, MONITORING AND REPORTING 11
TURBO CHARGING API ADOPTION 11
HCL SERVICE LINES 12
CASE STUDIES 12
MULTI-CHANNEL RETAILER USES AN API PLATFORM TO REDUCE
APP DEVELOPMENT TIME 12
LIFE SCIENCES COMPANY ENABLES APIs FOR INTERNAL AND
EXTERNAL CONSUMERS 13
FINANCIAL SERVICES COMPANY USES APIs TO INTEGRATE
DIGITAL CHANNELS WITH COMPLEX BACK-END SYSTEMS 13
REFERENCES 13
ABOUT HCL 14
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API-FICATION | AUGUST 2014
DIGITAL ENTERPRISES
The trend of publishing APIs to encourage the development of user applications is not
new. Born digital businesses, such as Yahoo! or Google have back-end platforms and
user-facing applications that provide well-defined APIs to allow access to the business
functionality and data. Online businesses are poised for digital growth by providing
APIs to widen the community of developers. The ubiquity of mobile devices and the
proliferation of social interactions have been an additional stimulus for enterprises to
provide APIs. APIs became the core building blocks of Digital Businesses, which is
clearly seen in their adoption and growth as depicted in the picture below.
This paper focuses on what Web APIs (Web Application Programming Interfaces,
called APIs hereafter) are, why they benefit enterprises, and in what situations
enterprises need an API infrastructure. The details about various API platforms, and
their comparison, and implementation methodologies will be covered in the follow-
ups to this paper.
This paper is meant for IT and Product executives who are responsible for:
yy Enabling mobile application development
yy Developing partner eco-systems
yy Evangelizing products and services in developer communities
yy Search of new revenue streams
This paper illustrates ways to leverage existing assets exposed by an enterprise’s internal
systems and make them available to different sets of users — customers, partners,
developers, or internal users, as well as ways to make the enterprise services available
to users on different devices – tablets, handsets and desktops, and through different
channels – in-store, online, call center, or phone.
In this paper, we also discuss a compelling rationale for API offerings, the recent hyper
growth of APIs, the approaches for creating API-based offerings, and the relative merits
of the leading API management platforms. Finally, we present three key business
transformation case studies in Retail, Financial Services, and Pharmaceutical domains.
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This paper does not focus on exploring the comparison of various API enablement
platforms and stacks that are currently available in the market; these will be addressed
in subsequent white papers.
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APIs allow different groups of developers, internal, external and partners to gain
access to enterprise systems in an easily consumable way. Typically, by using an API
platform (that comprises of API layer, API governance, API design time components,
API discovery and documentation, to name a few), these challenges of building and
delivering APIs from SOA and other existing infrastructures are addressed. These
platforms can address the varied demands on security, performance, governance,
stability, flexibility, and agility. In this white paper, we will present a few examples
of API platforms, after we discuss the rationale and the popular applications of APIs.
APIs Defined
APIs are the defined interfaces through which interactions happen between an
enterprise and applications that use its assets. An API can become the primary
entry point for enterprise services, for its own website and applications, as well as
for partner and customer integrations. APIs are defined through a contract so that
any application can use it with relative ease. In contrast to SOA services, APIs are
focused on programmable web, which includes web and native applications. As such,
the technical characteristics of the APIs are different than earlier generation services.
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2. Increasing business agility and foraying into different eco-systems: Since APIs
offer integration with any technology stack, they allow higher productivity for
the developers. Moreover, APIs let the enterprise reach out to a larger pool of
application developers to build apps on a suitable app eco-system (iOS, Android,
Kiosks, desktops) of their choice.
While existing digital businesses make the transition easily, we have seen that brick
and mortar businesses can also adopt the same strategy by leveraging APIs to explore
and foray into new business models.
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schedule their cars for charging during non-peak times, a feature that is made possible
by an external application built on the APIs provided by the company.
Another example is of a fast food chain that provides APIs to access customer activities,
which can be used by brands to offer special discounts. If a consumer has shown a
preference for a brand of soda, they can be offered a discount coupon to that drink at
a nearby grocery store. In this case, the restaurant chain shares the revenue from the
targeted brand by providing an API to the user transactional data.
A Retail API can give access to the inventory levels and location, which can be used
by mobile applications to guide consumers to stores in the vicinity. The creative use
of such data by a community of application developers creates an additional business
opportunity for retail businesses.
In the financial world, there has been innovation on the payments side from PayPal,
Stripe, Square and many more organizations. In banks, APIs can be used for bank-to-
bank straight through processing. Banks can use data insights to help customers benefit
from their life events such as marriage and their changing economic conditions. This
works better than exploiting the customer situation and cross-selling. To make such
insights available, APIs can ingest inbound events and enable real-time actionable
analytics using “outbound” push events.
API PLATFORMS
As described earlier, APIs are best served through a platform that supports design,
development, deployment, operations, and support. Depending on the context,
these platforms are named Back-end-as-a-Service (BaaS), mBaaS (mobile BaaS), API
gateways, API management platforms etc. They can be based on conventional (hosted,
in-premise, or on cloud) as well as a pay-as-you-go cloud model. In the figure below,
we categorize different providers based on their origin and offerings. Enterprises can
de-risk and accelerate API development and increase adoption by using tried and
tested API Platforms.
An API platform is an API infrastructure that is ready to build and run APIs with
minimum features and common services required of Web APIs, with elements of the
tech stack that digital enterprises need such as caching and security, and preferably
with a built-in support for API development and management. Ideally, it is configured
in the standard way and validated.
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API management is the process that provides publishing, promoting, developer self-
help, and governance of APIs in a secure and scalable environment. Optionally, it also
enables creation of end-user support artifacts, forums and collaboration environment.
Following are 10 categories that can determine the relative strengths of API platforms:
1. Ability to support mobile as well as web devices
2. Integration with other APIs
3. Ease of administration
4. Analytics and reporting
5. Rapid development, such as automated conversion to REST (Representational
State Transfer) APIs
6. Scalability and compliance to security requirements
7. Support for cloud and on-site offerings
8. Ability to support any geographic location, user management, and policy/
authentication mechanisms
9. Ability to support digital operations such as push notifications, data-caching,
localization, and geo-targeting
10. Ability to leverage existing services & middleware infrastructure
Enterprise Layer 7
Friendly Segment 2 Segment 3
APIGee
MuleSoft IBM
Mashery Tibco
3Scale
Segment 1 Segment 4
Sencha
Verivo WSO2
Developer
Friendly
Based on the relative strengths in these 10 categories, we can classify the API platforms
as shown in figure 4 into four segments. The image is defined in detail below.
Consumer Apps
The segment 1 is for API management platforms for mobile apps that are mainly
consumer-centric. Such apps are built on technologies such as HTML5 to provide
a dynamic user interface across different channels. The applications are largely
standalone and simple to use. Also, they use limited data, typically related to user
interactions. However, there can be very large number of users for such applications.
Sencha and Verivo have established themselves in this market.
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be abstracted out as platform features. The integration of core APIs with common
services and a robust framework aids user adoption significantly.
Another important consideration for an API platform is its customization for target
audiences – internal, partners and external developers.
yy The APIs for internal consumption have a fewer numbers of users. Here API
management is fairly limited, and development as well as the implementation can
proceed in parallel
yy A partner-facing API strategy is dependent on the number of partners and their
relative maturity. In a scenario with a handful of mature partners, APIs can keep
evolving and will only need moderate management, whereas for a large number of
partners, more mature APIs and management platforms are required
yy For a broader developer base - internal as well as external, robust APIs and
management platforms are essential for faster adoption and scalability
Our Approach
API platform enablement includes the definition of business APIs, platform
implementation and deployment including integration with common services APIs,
launch, management, and continued monitoring of the API platform. HCL provides
expertise across all these phases.
The discovery phase includes evaluation of the business model, API assessment
for completeness, API strategy, packing and monetization. A strategy workshop is
conducted during this phase to finalize the API roadmap, the high level definitions
and timeline for the implementation of the roadmap, and the monetization options.
API definition should focus on the core business services because common services
such as user management, authentication, metering/billing can be availed from
various platform libraries. For example, a retail business API will include access to
the product inventory, prices, discount coupons, product reviews, and store locations
while services such as payment or billing or shopping cart management can be availed
from existing libraries.
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Captive data, which has high potential, needs to be exposed with the right usage
including relevant aggregations. At the same time, a multi-tenant platform needs to
be carefully managed for access rights to the data.
The API design needs to be architected to service the target audience. Multiple choices
are available for the API management platform and their relative merits are discussed
below. Choosing the right API management tool in the early phase is very important.
APIs must have hooks into the logging, metering, billing and reporting infrastructure.
Granularity and breadth of interfaces are determined by the audience requirements
and goals.
yy Seamless Integration
Core APIs need to be presented in a seamlessly integrated offering to create a unified
experience for t users. Any repetitive operation between APIs, such as multiple requests
for user credentials creates barriers to a wider adoption of the APIs. Integration with
common services such as authentication, logging, and metadata management will
facilitate the creation of a complete package for application developers.
Continuous support and improvement of the platform or the API requires detailed
data on API use, data traffic, and exceptions. A management dashboard to display
aggregate data is an essential part of IT operations.
Frequent reports and online monitoring of the APIs will help provision for fluctuation
in API usage needs, identify bottlenecks that inhibit scalability as well as suggest
operational improvements. Visualization tools are available for a wide-ranging
audience such as the API support staff, and for the operations management team.
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Developing use cases for API usage, new apps, and setting up an innovation center are
other steps that can be taken to turbo-charge the adoption of APIs.
yy Intelligent choice of APIs: It is critical to design APIs that expose the core value
proposition and data from the business, and minimize any effort on a utility API
that can be available from other sources. With our knowledge and expertise in
wide-ranging utility APIs, we can reduce the cycle time for this critical activity. We
also aggressively promote the design of RESTful APIs
yy API lifecycle management: After the first version of the API, continual monitoring
of its use, both from a feature and volume and frequency perspective, is critical for
its continual adoption by customers. HCL can put into place the right monitoring
and improvement processes that will ensure that the adoption grows continually
yy API management platform and reporting: Choosing an API management
platform that fits the business strategy is critical to success across the API lifecycle.
HCL can help choose and implement the right API platform from the vast array
of traditional ESB platforms, as well as new solutions that started with API
management as their core focus
There are 3 service lines that HCL offers as a part of API enablement:
1. API Landscape & Discovery: Enabling customers with an API strategy and a
discovery phase.
2. API Development & Life Cycle Management: Designing and developing APIs
based on an API platform, monitoring, support, and management.
3. API Adoption & Turbo Charging: Setting up an innovation center, app
development, and use case development for faster and sustained adoption of APIs.
CASE STUDIES
Three case studies have been selected from HCL’s many API-related engagements and
are discussed below. They are from multi-channel retail, life sciences, and financial
services domains.
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available to partner channels with adequate controls and security. The retailer was also
looking to accelerate the time-to-market for apps, and drive marketplace innovation
to gain a competitive edge.
HCL helped create an API services platform that had common services and
frameworks for authorization, security, I18N, validation, error handling, logging
and regression testing available to developers of different business modules. The
effort spanned fifty people months. The platform was built in a DIY mode using
Grails as MVC framework. The API platform was consumed by an HTML5-based
App platform using Bootstrap.js. The common UI components and templates were
prebuilt as per UX guidelines, reducing iterations between business, user experience,
and development teams. The use of iterative development and loose coupling between
the Apps and Backend APIs resulted in fast mockups and parallel development on
APIs. This reduced the development time for apps built using the platform by 50%,
and provided consistency in the App portfolio built by geographically-spread teams.
HCL will implement fifty APIs. The project goal is an 80% reduction in the store
activation time, and a 75% reduction in the channel partner on-boarding time.
REFERENCES
(n.d.). Forrester Report.
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