Mastering the API Marketplace Supply Chain

API Marketplaces: Boom or Bust?

In recent years, we’ve seen an explosion of buzz and tooling surrounding API marketplaces. The vision is clear; create a flourishing ecosystem where internal, partner, and/or public consumers can find, understand, and subscribe to your APIs to build better products and services. APIs are productized and directly or indirectly monetized. And fundamentally, we’re able to deliver on the promises of the API economy. But in practice, many marketplaces are falling short in both traction and ROI for organizations.

When setting up a marketplace, many focus on the end result: a set of perfect APIs, advertised in a storefront that provides a great consumer subscribing and onboarding experience. But, without mastering the marketplace supply chain in a way that’s always on and always connected, the marketplace vision becomes just a glamorized developer portal and lacks strategic value.

If it’s manually populated with manually developed APIs and manually maintained, it’s impossible to:

• Scale up to the number of APIs that the organization wants in their populated marketplace
• Provide a user experience to all types of consumers (developers and business roles, e.g., the growing importance of product managers in the API ecosystem)
• Provide more than just a list of APIs, e.g., grouping in business capabilities, regions, or bundles; for example, having a set of payment APIs that are US compliant and another that are EU compliant

Your marketplace is only as good as the APIs that populate it. These need to be carefully curated to a gold standard so that they are complete, understandable, and reliable. They must also be up-to-date with the latest version, documentation, metadata, etc.

It’s hard to drive adoption, speed, and ultimately hard to get the API economy and its ecosystem to flourish without a proper supply chain to deliver these gold standard APIs to your consumer experiences.

What’s Involved in the Supply Chain

The mature API marketplace supply chain involves some key components:

1. An accurate API portfolio view (a holistic catalog). A reliable unified view of every API (and Event, Message, Service, etc.) the organization has; including what marketplace candidates already exist and how close they are to reaching the gold standard threshold for externalization. Most large enterprises have multiple runtimes, each with their own Developer Portal. You need a holistic view of all of these, and a view that describes each API in plain English so they’re understandable by a range of roles.

2. A top-down, business-led development process for creating new APIs to be published to the marketplace. APIs developed in a collaborative, domain-driven, consumer-centric way, aligned to business priorities for internal, public, and partner APIs your consumers will love.

3. Effective lifecycle management for the APIs already in the marketplace. A reliable way to iterate new versions, track new and update existing dependencies, and update and manage documentation, NFRs, and other metadata. And, a way to make (often complex) changes without affecting production APIs and safely retire redundant APIs.

4. Governance alignment across the lifecycle. Leveraging an automated yet flexible API governance model to ensure assets conform to all policies, including security, consistent payloads, and API completeness.

5. Version management and lifecycle state management. This allows the consumer to understand which version to use and identify upcoming APIs they might want to consume once in production.

6. Reporting and metrics. As your store front expands across different runtimes, you need a reliable view of what’s being consumed (and what isn’t) so your stock can be optimized and kept fresh. This helps you track actual vs. expected KPIs for your APIs, and drives cost efficiency and maximizes overall ROI of the marketplace.

7. Active connection between points 1-6 (and connection to the wider IT landscape). So the marketplace is always up to date with accurate information and the latest APIs — instead of relying on manually updating the marketplace, a huge drain on time and resources. Doing this also allows in-flight APIs to be accurately tracked and advertised to consumers, instead of only those already in production.

Challenges in the Supply Chain and How to Overcome Them

There are also some challenges to mastering the marketplace supply chain.

The first is how to successfully identify marketplace candidates. You likely have a diverse runtime environment, running APIs in multiple formats (e.g., REST, SOAP, Async), in different stages of governance compliance. And, any record of these are likely siloed from each other, as well as those APIs currently in flight. You need an upstream holistic catalog supporting a great provider view of everything the organization has now across all API types, patterns, and platforms.

The second is the developer overhead in the supply chain. With developers now spending nearly 50% of their time manually crafting and debugging code, you need to instead establish a programmatic lifecycle management process; leveraging automation across the plan, design, and build stages. And done so in a way that other personas can be involved and inject their expertise too.

The third challenge is how to enable the flexibility and future-proofing we all need in our API programs, and apply that to the marketplace. The only constant in technology is change. You may well want to refactor some APIs in the marketplace to more efficient patterns over time. Or your consumers may require a specific format for their needs (and don't want to wait months for you to make it available!). Your API designs are the artifact of most value; manage them in an abstracted way so they can quickly be migrated and deployed in whatever format needed. Think of them as composable business building blocks instead of implementation-specific APIs.

Finally, one of the biggest challenges in mastering the marketplace supply chain is how to actually connect all these systems and processes. Look for tooling that offers robust agents, connectors, and/or integration expertise to facilitate the hook up between catalog and lifecycle management with your marketplace.

A successful API marketplace is delivered when the business planning and architecture planning meet in the middle, and the supply chain is a key factor in this; master it today!