How big is the API Management Market?

APIs are eating the world.

APIs are being discussed on the board-level—even written about in Forbes Magazine. APIs are behind everything digital. And APIs are in every discussion when it comes to a modern “transformed” business. Employee Experience. Customer Experience. Every Experience. APIs are behind every great and modern experience.

 Gartner reports the global API Management Market to be $1.97B by revenue in 2020¹.

That’s big, right? But is that all? This is where it gets interesting.

APIs are a foundation for modern integration. APIs are the primary method to connect to modern applications—cloud and on-prem. Integration itself is evolving around APIs. Integration vendors are adding API Management capabilities. And the rapidly evolving enterprise iPaaS market counts API Management as table stakes. Entry criteria to be considered an enterprise iPaaS are API Management capabilities.

Gartner reports the global enterprise iPaaS Market is $3.17B by revenue in 2020.¹

That’s huge, right? There is more.

APIs are foundational for modern application development. Apps run on APIs. Application Platform (aPaaS) vendors are adding API Management.

The Application Platform Market (technology and tooling to build applications) is now split between high-control aPaaS and high-productivity aPaaS. For a cheat sheet—high control = write code catering to a more technical user, high productivity = avoid writing code catering to a less technical user.

In the Application Platform Market, high productivity includes a notion of “integration via APIs” and all the vendors are including API integration capabilities and some explicitly including API Management capabilities. Then in the high control application platform market vendors are starting to include a level of API Gateways.

The combination of High Productivity and High Control Application Platform Markets globally is $6.6B by revenue in 2020¹!

But on a fourth front, even bigger, the big infrastructure platform as a service plays are adding capabilities to API Management. You know who these are—Azure, AWS, etc. Why? They seek to have the essential capabilities to ease bringing all your applications to their platform. And guess what, APIs are at the center of all modern applications.

“The worldwide public cloud service market will reach $263 billion in 2020, growing 16.4% over 2019 in U.S. dollars (17% in constant currency). Software as a service will remain the largest segment, reaching $167 billion in 2023.”²

So sure, you can only look at the stand-alone market analysis. But this notion of APIs and managing them effectively is ultimately bigger than that. And this isn’t the first time API Management has been on the rise; read how the API Market was soaring back in 2018.

A centralized yet hybrid API strategy is essential to have where it can span multi-cloud, where it can span the use of a variety of API Gateways but also where it must be brought together for common policy management and API discovery across all usage patterns and a variety of personas. The opportunity is HUGE!

1. Gartner, Forecast: Enterprise Infrastructure Software, Worldwide, 2017-2023, 4Q19 Update, Subsegments: Full Life Cycle API Management, Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS), High Control aPaaS, High Productivity aPaaS, Vanitha Dsilva, Laurie Wurster, Fabrizio Biscotti, Alan Dayley, Michael Warrilow, Terilyn Palanca, Bindi Bhullar, Chandra Mukhyala, Sharat Menon, Rustam Malik, 26 December 2019 https://www.gartner.com/document/3978716
2. Gartner, Forecast: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 2017-2023, 4Q19 Update, Colleen Graham, Neha Gupta, Vanitha Dsilva, Balaji Abbabatulla, David Ackerman, Ed Anderson, Bindi Bhullar, Fabrizio Biscotti, Ruggero Contu, Yanna Dharmasthira, Mike Dorosh, Jim Hare, John Kostoulas, Sid Nag, Terilyn Palanca, Chris Pang, Gregor Petri, Julian Poulter, Craig Roth, TJ Singh, Cathy Tornbohm, Alys Woodward, Laurie Wurster, 19 January 2020 https://www.gartner.com/document/3979743