What job are you hiring your APIs to do? Look to a leader for answers.

I couldn’t be prouder of our Axway teams: we’ve been recognized as a Leader — for the sixth time — in the 2021 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Full Life Cycle API Management.¹ Although this is a great honor, I’m really not all that surprised. Of course, we’re a leader!

I believe it’s because we’re not content with merely keeping up with the peloton. We work hard to provide an API Management platform that evolves with customer’s needs to stay at the front of the pack. I’m sure other companies work just as hard.

Perhaps we demand more of ourselves than others. Continuous innovation is a strategic imperative for Axway because, for the last 20 years, we’ve been laser-focused on listening to what our customers need from us. They want solutions, not just tools, to help them move faster than ever before. Companies that can rise to the demand, will break out from the pack.

It’s not just about managing APIs anymore. It’s about making them consumable.

Part of being a leader means constantly testing the winds. Today, it’s not enough for companies to manage APIs just for the sake of managing APIs. When I look in the rearview mirror, I see a vibrant, connected universe of organizations suddenly awakening to the possibilities of API-based integrations — possibilities that were apparent to us five years ago! Nowadays, companies need more than just the technology. They also need guidance to move their business forward. As leaders, we’d like to guide you beyond the technology of APIs to focus more on API consumption.

Think of it this way: When a tree falls in a forest and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound? Many companies have hundreds of APIs, but they have no idea which ones are being consumed, which ones add value, and which ones they should double down on or deprovision. If you have APIs you can’t see or aren’t being used, do they still serve a purpose?

It’s expensive to keep APIs around if no one’s going to consume them. Building a new one isn’t cheap either. But can you imagine the cost of continually rebuilding an API for a certain job because you simply don’t know it already exists?

I’m reminded of business legend Clayton Christensen’s jobs theory, which he first described in 2006. He invites us to ask, “What job is our product hired to do?” When you treat APIs as a product, you realize that it has no value if it just sits unused in a repository somewhere. Its value doesn’t really surface until it is discovered and starts being consumed.

It’s time to “Open Everything.”

At Axway, we want customers to “Open Everything” — to unlock the full value of their data and APIs so they can open new markets, experiences, and possibilities. That means changing the way people think about API management — to adopt a modernized view of what’s possible.

Modernizing your digital infrastructure and opening up the value in your business means you’ll have timely access to backend systems in a secure, controlled, and scalable way — all while maintaining visibility across all your systems and data transactions. You don’t need to disrupt your business or scrap your legacy IT either. That way you can manage the complexity of your API landscape and make APIs more consumable to an expanded ecosystem of teams, partners, customers. Making your APIs easy to consume, is how you begin to open everything.

You have a leader on your side

Axway is in the vanguard of this shift to API consumption. The real challenge in API management is being able to draw the greatest value from every API in ways that will drive business. And that often comes down to how visible and, ultimately, consumable your APIs are.

Axway Amplify — the only open, independent platform for managing and governing APIs across teams, the hybrid cloud, and third-party solutions — addresses these challenges directly:

• Automated discovery of all your API assets across your distributed IT environments (even non-Axway) for central control and monitoring
• API providers can publish, secure, track, and monitor their assets while retaining independence to use existing or new technology
• Unified catalog brings producers and consumers together in one place to facilitate reuse and speed adoption.
• API consumers can more easily discover, subscribe, and consume API assets to accelerate time to value for digital business

Axway is a proven partner in building your digital business because we don’t just have the tools, we also have the vision and expertise to get you from here to there.

But don’t take my word for it. Look at how we help NOV Inc. deliver reliable and secure business services around the clock. Or how 85% of the top 20 pharmaceutical manufacturers rely on Axway. Check out Engie, a global leader in innovative, low-carbon energy and services that is accelerating the development of new data-driven services.

We’re a leader because we don’t lock our customers into a box defined by our platform. We ask them, “what is the job you’ve hired your APIs to do?” And we work backwards from there to power their business forward. Let us do the same for you.

¹Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Full Life Cycle API Management, Shameen Pillai | Kimihiko Iijima | Mark O’Neill | John Santoro | Akash Jain | Fintan Ryan, 28 September 2021

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