Sneak Peek: Results for the 2018 State of API Integration Report

Last year we collected data from over 165 applications, covering 28,000+ integration instances, and 1.6+ billion API calls, all leading to the first annual State of API Integration Report of 2017. Our findings provided important key trends, correlating a prolific increase in web APIs to proof on how integral APIs have become in business strategy, product development and scalability.

The 2017 report set the benchmark for API integrations. All the measures culminate to an interactive API Integration Scorecard, where readers rank their own API against a set of criteria unveiled in the report. The scorecard reached far corners of the earth, and beat our expectations in number of completions. While we will save a majority of the new research for 2018 reports, here's a sneak peek at some of the scorecard data we have collected so far:

The Average Score [From the Community] is 56.6

We took a vote from our developers on which application they work with day-in and day-out is considered best-in-class and worst-in-class. While we will not name names here, what you need to know is that the BEST API scores at a 91, and the WORST API scores at a 34.

So when we saw that the community averaged around a 56.6 from our interactive API Integration scorecard, the data feels on par with our expectations. General areas in need of improvement include support for event frameworks and metadata discovery.

60% of Apps Are Built on REST APIs

Room for improvement in the coming year is continuing to migrate applications off of SOAP frameworks to REST APIs, and leveraging new platforms.

Nearly 40% Apps Do Not Support Event Framework

The crux of integration is around orchestration. If data cannot flow from system-to-system, in real-time, have you really built an API integration?

Event-Driven Architecture is certainly not a new methodology, but it's enjoying renewed support in the world of integration because it reduces coupling between services and provides a far more effcient way of synchronizing and updating data.

A Better Report in 2018

We're expanding our research in 2018 to better understand API development outside of our catalog of 165 applications. The State of API Integration Survey is designed specifically for the app development community (stretching from engineering and IT to product and business leaders), with hope to further develop the data against our own API integration development.

The research is still LIVE! And we would love for you to contribute! Please take 6 minutes to fill out our survey. All questions are optional, and if you would like to remain anonymous, you can! That said, if you leave us your name and email address, you will be entered into a raffle for an iDrone Smart FY603 Mini Quadcopter. Please note the drone contest is only eligible for US & Canada; world-wide participation in the survey is encouraged. We will cut off raffle entries on December 15th and make an announcement of the winner the following day.

All those that contribute to the 2018 research will also receive early access to 2018's report, targeted to release in March 2018.