We’re proud that Axway is named a Leader in the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Full Life Cycle API Management¹ – for the seventh time! It’s an honor that fuels our fire for continuing to execute our “Open Everything” vision.
What’s more, Axway is recognized in the 2022 Gartner Critical Capabilities for Full Life Cycle API Management receiving the highest score (3.5 out of 5) for the Distributed API Management Use Case.² This is the first year this use case has been evaluated in the Critical Capabilities for Full Life Cycle Management report.
We want enterprises around the world to freely participate in expanding ecosystems, because we know that openness will lead to important problem solving and greater innovation. But what does all of that really mean?
What is the point of a vision if you can’t execute on it?
The importance of driving API consumption
Last year, I said the real challenge in API management is being able to draw the greatest value from every API in ways that will drive business. It wasn’t just talk: we’ve been hard at work refining the answer to the dilemma of API consumption.
Finding, subscribing to, and consuming APIs shouldn’t be difficult. And API consumption isn’t the industry’s best-kept secret: people know it’s important. In fact, in a survey conducted this year, 86 percent of business and IT leaders agreed the value of APIs is in their consumption, and not in their existence alone.
Yet, in that same survey, 71% of API decision-makers said they didn’t experience the business results they had planned for from their APIs. It’s clearly time to realign strategy and execution.
Driving API consumption often comes down to how visible and, ultimately, consumable your APIs are. And that’s why we believe our brand-new Amplify Enterprise Marketplace is the answer.
Only a truly open platform can execute on API consumption
Some API platforms will provide an API marketplace with no API management capability, and thus no API observability. Others will provide observability, but only if you use their proprietary proxy API gateway – which drives up cost, latency, and deployment time, as well as creating an unnecessary point of failure.
How can you achieve universal API management – from discovery and cataloguing to publishing APIs on a marketplace – if it’s not truly universal?
A vision for universal API management is useless without an accurate view: a complete, centralized overview of all your APIs, regardless of where they are – vendor-agnostic, multi-cloud (AWS, Azure…), on-prem, hybrid.
Axway Amplify is the only API management platform that can do that, bringing all your APIs securely into view. It’ll even discover unmanaged APIs from code repositories and other registries. Observability is key, as Gartner predicts that by 2025, less than 50% of enterprise APIs will be managed, as explosive growth in APIs surpasses the capabilities of API management tools.³
Keeping a finger on the API management pulse
This explosion of APIs is also an exciting opportunity. Virtually every organization is building and using internal APIs at this point, but the market for public APIs has nearly doubled: 94% of organizations use or are planning to use public APIs provided by third-parties; up from 52% in 2019.⁴
Where will developers go to find and use those APIs?
Beside the challenge of making APIs more discoverable, there’s a growing awareness of the importance of developer experience. And with this growth of external and partner-facing APIs comes the next challenge: API monetization.
An API-as-a-product mindset can help overcome these obstacles: if APIs are digital products, then you need to build them with the consumer – developers – in mind. And you’ll need a “storefront” to expose these products.
Amplify Enterprise Marketplace helps developers find and consume APIs by bringing all your APIs together in one place, with the rich documentation associated. It also makes it easier to productize and monetize APIs, allowing you to:
- Create API products that can be bundled by domain or audience, documented, and tagged.
- Drive API adoption and monetization by approaching your APIs as marketable products.
Analysts, customers, and companies engaged in this work are seeing it every day: APIs are exploding – with significant growth in outward-facing APIs – and many of these will soon be unmanaged and unused. A major differentiator will be taming API complexity to provide a rich yet simplified experience for developers looking to use your APIs.
It’s time to push past the API plateau
Many enterprise leaders have caught the API vision. They know APIs can drive brilliant digital experiences and help serve their customers in innovative ways. They believe APIs can connect them to a growing ecosystem and unlock new business opportunities. And they understand that the value of APIs lies in their consumption.
But after building and securing many APIs, they’re feeling stuck. They’re wondering how long it’ll be before they get to enjoy a return on their API investment, and they’re struggling to drive adoption of all these APIs.
Where do we go from here?
Your API marketplace is the missing link to open up to the world. It’s where the rubber hits the road.
A unified, centralized marketplace drives API adoption by making your APIs easy to find and consume, both internally and externally – so you can treat all your APIs like the rich digital products they are. It’s where business and IT align so your APIs can drive business results.
We’re proud of our industry-leading API management platform. And I believe we’re uniquely positioned to help you execute your vision to its fullest with Axway Amplify Enterprise Marketplace. Let us show you how.
Click here for complimentary access to read the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Full Life Cycle API Management.
¹Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Full Life Cycle API Management, Shameen Pillai, Kimihiko Iijima, Mark O’Neill, John Santoro, Paul Dumas, Akash Jain, 14 November 2022
²Gartner, Critical Capabilities for Full Life Cycle Management, Shameen Pillai, Kimihiko Iijima, Mark O’Neill, John Santoro, Paul Dumas, Akash Jain, 15 November 2022
³Gartner, Predicts 2022: APIs Demand Improved Security and Management, Shameen Pillai, Jeremy D’Hoinne, John Santoro, Mark O’Neill, Sham Gill, 6 December 2021
⁴Gartner, Hype Cycle™ for APIs, 2022, Mark O’Neill, John Santoro, 10 August 2022
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s Research & Advisory organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark and MAGIC QUADRANT and HYPE CYCLE are registered trademarks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.