The Role of APIs in Post-Pandemic Digital Transformation
The application programming interface (API) has long been a foundational element to digital transformation for businesses across sectors. Today’s developers use many kinds of APIs to build their applications, especially cloud-native microservices-based applications.
An API’s ability to connect a diversity of disparate software applications and products to integrate and be interoperable in ways that didn’t exist is the cornerstone of application features and service innovation. To stay competitive or gain a competitive edge, your company will need APIs to:
- Speed up the development of new applications that you can connect to internal applications for internal business operations across divisions or departments
- Create a robust AppDev ecosystem for faster app development and time to market
- Develop a strategic B2B partner ecosystem for new synergies in products and services that grow your customer base
Your startup or enterprise developers may be starting an AppDev API development project. You may want to connect with existing APIs from other businesses and applications to create new customer services and opportunities where none existed before. It’s likely that you’re looking for a partner like Techolution that understands how to create and implement APIs to drive web application development for specific business outcomes.
Techolution works with global companies like Rupi Bisnis (Rupi Case study link here) on enterprise digital transformation using APIs to:
- Realize new customer experience and service possibilities for their growing customer base.
- Take a monolithic legacy application that couldn’t scale to a GCP microservices application architecture with new API endpoint integration,
The popular app has the scalability it needs for growth and the ability to connect their digital payment app to new services in the fastest growing market in Southeast Asia and one of the fastest growing markets on the planet.
By working with an enterprise digital transformation partner like Techolution, your business can explore, understand, and realize the possibilities in the power of APIs for web application development and service delivery. The end state of where your business wants to be is in using APIs to achieve important business outcomes that make you more competitive, agile, and profitable while lowering costs.
Your first step to making APIs work for your enterprise internally or externally (with potentially millions of customers demanding new services) starts with understanding:
- The different types of APIs
- How they work
- The broader scope of what they can provide in terms of business outcomes for application development.
Types of APIs Used in Web Application Development
There are four general types of APIs used in web applications that can deliver business outcomes in unique ways.
- Public APIs that are open and available for use by any outside developer or business to enable sharing of applications. These types of APIs can e monetized by the owner so that businesses desiring to connect with the API pay a per-call cost.
- Partner APIs that are offered to specific third-party business partner developers or API consumers for business-to-business use, such as sharing customer data via CRM, for example. They typically pay partners for their services and both parties benefit.
- Composite APIs that combine two or more APIs for related operations to improve speed and performance over a single API
- Internal APIs are for internal enterprise use to connect systems and data within the business. Internal APIs can make it possible to enable:
- Quick and secure app development through easy adaptation of changing business requirements
- Interactions between departments that can now share resources for new business streamlining and operations across former silos
- Inter-departmental interactions for greater efficiency and productivity (RESTful APIs are often used to achieve this efficiency)
- Development across multiple applications and channels to deliver real-time information and data sharing
- Automating existing tasks to streamline processes and cost savings as opposed to the expensive costs associated with custom code development
Overall process automation via RESTful internal APIs for service expansion that occurs with much lower cost and increased data security and functionality.