France’s AIFE (Agence pour l’Informatique Financiere de l’Etat — Agency for State Financial IT) leverages Axway’s Amplify Platform to enable thousands of users across the country to publish and consume APIs. Here’s a look at how they do it.
The French government established AIFE in 2005 to guarantee the consistency of the national financial information system, and to define and execute on strategy for the system. The range of products managed by AIFE covers three different types of solutions:
- In the budgetary and accountancy domain: solutions to manage financial functioning of the French state.
- In the electronic invoicing and public procurement domain: solutions for all public entities and their suppliers.
- In the domain of the intermediation of digital services, shared tools enabling interoperability of the solutions.
Choosing an open, flexible platform
In this latter domain, AIFE needed to help service providers follow best practices in publishing, securing, and managing their APIs. They looked to Axway for an open, flexible approach to API management that is completely agnostic when it comes to business use cases.
“The strategic goal of the ‘PISTE’ project was to build an API platform with the loosest possible coupling between the technical and business aspects,” says Michel Traisnel, Manager of AIFE’s Exchange System Division. “The loose coupling means that any business service published on the platform can be updated by the service provider without necessarily requiring changes to PISTE.”
Toward those goals, the agency chose Axway’s Amplify Platform as the foundation for PISTE (Platforme d’Intermédiation des Services pour la Transformation de l’Etat — Service Intermediation Platform for State Transformation), a service intermediation platform for transformation of the state. Already an Amplify customer, AIFE knew that the Axway platform could simplify API management for different suppliers with varying use cases.
“Our guiding principle for PISTE was openness,” says Traisnel. “We have an existing set of off-the-shelf services and whenever we develop another service for a supplier with a specific need, we always broaden it so that it can be used by other suppliers too.”
Serving 30 million API calls per day
Within five months of initiating the project, AIFE went live with the first version of PISTE and the first API, from Guichet Entreprises, an online service supporting entrepreneurs and small businesses. Since then, PISTE has welcomed around a dozen publishers of APIs, including the Ministry of Ecological Transition and the Ministry of Justice.
PISTE currently offers users a choice of 95 APIs, and there are 11,000 applications registered on the platform. On average, PISTE services between 20 and 30 million API calls daily, up from 15 to 20 million just 18 months ago.
With a catalog of off-the-shelf services available in PISTE, and a structured approach to best practices, AIFE is accelerating the process of creating and publishing APIs. Because configuration and deployment are now so much faster, AIFE can spend more time talking with suppliers, understanding their pain points, and helping them achieve their objectives.
Partnering with API management experts
Traisnel credits Axway’s consultants for bringing specialized expertise and deep experience to the PISTE project.
“The input from Axway was decisive, providing the expertise we needed to ensure a rapid and successful project. Their guidance in terms of best practices was also vital, because we wanted to avoid having to rework existing capabilities each time a new requirement emerged.”
See also: Solving common API challenges with an API First approach [Podcast]
The Axway solution is helping AIFE to industrialize the creation and management of APIs. Amplify API Management enables repeatability in their processes. They know what questions to ask suppliers, and their model gets richer over time.
The same benefits accrue to enterprises that choose Amplify Platform to support their API strategies. Amplify Platform speeds innovation between internal and external teams, enabling all kinds of organizations to reach new markets and customers with an open, flexible solution that can scale as your business grows.
Read the full case study.