API Archaeology: Guiding the API Journey

Part of the Axway Catalyst mission is to help organizations on their API Journey. As part of this mission, we speak to many organizations in various stages of their journey. There still are many who haven’t yet started, but they see the potential of building an open platform and are eager to start embracing APIs.

One of the things we hear a fair bit are organizations saying something along the lines of “We’re not yet using APIs, but we’re interested, can you please tell us more.” While that may be technically correct, if you think about the idea of APIs, which is to be interconnecting interfaces between applications, then of course all organizations nowadays are using them, because they have been interconnecting all kinds of applications for a long time.

Looking at these existing ways of how applications are interconnected, we can call these Proto-APIs and we can use them as a way to guide our API Journey. This makes sense because these proto-APIs are excellent indicators where investments were made to interconnect applications, and thus where value can be created by doing so.

One of the important aspects of APIs is that they go beyond the traditional 1:1 models of proto-API models, and this is where planning the API Journey becomes interesting: By looking at the existing proto- APIs and contemplating where opening up assets and capabilities can unlock potential and create value, organizations can use their existing IT landscape to guide their API Journey.

In the following video you can learn more about the various proto-APIs to consider (file transfer, data integration, and application integration) and about the important things to consider when starting your API Journey. In short, start small, design for change, cultivate the API landscape, build around a platform model, and make sure to manage the growing pains of scaling up the API Journey.