Amplify Enterprise Marketplace is a game-changer in how you expand your digital services into new use cases and new markets. It allows you to create your own marketplace of APIs — all completely packaged and neatly categorized — that internal and external application developers can easily access and adopt.
In our third blog of this “art of the possible” series, I’d like to share a little bit about how Marketplace’s command line interface can help automate the processes between taking an API from digital asset to easily consumable product. After all, making developers’ lives easier is a surefire way to get APIs to market faster!
Productizing APIs in a marketplace
API adoption is key to realizing the maximum business value from all your API investments, since those that go unconsumed are essentially valueless. Amplify Enterprise Marketplace doesn’t just give developers a centralized place for adopting your APIs, it enables them to find the right API instantly.
As Axway’s Mourad Jaakou, General Manager of Amplify Platform, notes in our 2024 predictions guide, this new year promises a rise in API productization and API marketplace adopters as enterprises are starting to truly understand the importance of API products as business capabilities.
Here’s a quick demo of how the APIs appear to consumers and on the backend to API product managers.
(Watch the full Marketplace demo here.)
A lot of this backend work described above can be done manually via the platform API – writing a program and interacting with it programmatically.
But it’s also possible to automate most of this within the marketplace, using the command line interface. Amplify Marketplace provides you with both options, making it possible to build this automation into your DevOps lifecycle.
For example, as shown in the demo above, I can use the UI to do things like attach pricing plans and documentation to my API.
Or, I can do that automatically. Every time a product owner is developing a new product, in theory they need to go to their catalog of documents and attach the right ones (or maybe create a new document), which requires some searching.
Automation could make that part of the development process, so when a new product is created, Marketplace’s CLI would link the documentation for me so the human developer doesn’t have to do that.
The CLI can also automatically package products for me; when a new API is discovered, I can choose to automatically turn it into an asset and automatically turn that into a product.
Automating the creation of API products
It is of course important to take the time to properly document and package APIs, but this sort of automation can be very helpful for developers as they commit code and want to move on to testing.
They need to go to the portal, find the APIs, and try using them, so having to go through the additional steps of creating an asset and a product can be frustrating. Automating the process using the CLI can simplify things.
When you deploy an API to the gateway, it will be discovered and end up in your service registry, but not in the consumer interface – there are still a few steps to take before it ends up in the marketplace where you can actually go and test it.
The extra steps required to make the API available to consumers and testers can slow down development and we’ve had users ask us about that process of getting from resource to product. Developers want to test right away, so letting them automatically generate assets can help speed up the process.
This means developers could finish checking their code, deploy the API to the gateway, and then have the marketplace pick it up and automatically generate a test product.
WATCH: What is an API Product and what is its role in a successful API strategy?
Using categories and tags to automate API product creation
Another feature of Amplify Marketplace that can help automate productization is the categories and tags, which help control how APIs and API products are visualized in the marketplace.
For example, you might have a section in your API marketplace called “Featured Categories.” API products would only show up in here if they have 1) been placed into a category and 2) that category has been tagged as “Featured.”
Those aren’t strictly development time tasks, but rather part of the packaging and marketing process that makes an API a true product vs merely a technical widget. When I’m preparing the product for the marketplace, it’s important that items are tagged and categorized properly.
But maybe I want to drive that automatically through my DevOps processes, rather than leaving it in the hands of my product owners.
Amplify Marketplace’s CLI can implement rules you define for grouping assets, so you could automatically add any APIs coming through the development pipeline tagged “Christmas,” for example, into the featured category.
Using this foundation and the rich dataset provided by Amplify Marketplace, you could use AI models to more intelligently suggest assets, which I’ve described in some detail back here and will continue to explore in an upcoming blog.
Empower citizen integrators with Amplify Enterprise Marketplace
The automation and productization steps described above ultimately get at the larger theme of connecting IT and business thanks to the API marketplace.
By leveraging Amplify Marketplace, organizations can create easy-to-adopt digital products — bundles of well-documented API assets that bridge the IT-business gap by addressing specific business needs.
One global pharmaceutical leader recently shared how the marketplace approach is transforming the experience for consumers:
“We are shifting from standalone APIs with descriptions that assume significant knowledge on the part of the user to packages of APIs that are clearly labeled based on the high-level capabilities they deliver,” says a spokesperson.
“We are confident that this approach will help us ramp up adoption quickly. Looking further ahead, the goal is to use Amplify Marketplace to enable the ‘citizen integrator’: complete self-service for API development.”
Through their engagement with Axway, the company is transforming into an agile, data-driven enterprise, supported at every level by API enablement as a service.
An API marketplace gives both teams the tools to better understand how they can use assets to drive the business. And improving and simplifying the developer experience – whether on the production side through automation or on the consumption side with clear categories, grouping, and documentation – will help make your APIs more easily accessible.
Learn more about how Amplify Enterprise Marketplace helps enable digital business success with your APIs.