Maximize the value of your APIs with a connected catalog

Next week, our CEO Jeremy Sindall is hosting a webinar with our CTO and banking architecture expert sayee bapatla on how large enterprises are using a connected catalog to evolve their API strategies. So, in this month’s newsletter we’re looking at some of the challenges of an enterprise-scale API program and why a connected catalog is the answer.

You can register to listen-in live at 10am ET or receive a recording here!

First it was APIs, then the focus moved to becoming API First, but now APIs are not your only assets.

Your company is dependent on a lot — enterprise application and data sources, cloud and on-prem application environments, and an expanding cast of runtime integration options. Most of us are now all-in on APIs as a way to connect this disparate landscape, but they’re growing exponentially as a result, and it’s not just REST APIs that are involved. Noname security’s 2022 report found that the average company now has nearly 15,600 APIs, and while “API” is now used in the space as an umbrella term, it’s really APIs, Services, Events, Messages, Data (and more!) that enterprises are working with.

And each of those assets are provided, consumed, changed, bundled, forgotten about, audited, relied on to respond to business priorities. It’s ever-increasingly complex to manage, and more importantly ensure value from!

That’s where a catalog comes in. But there’s a few types that are now commonplace in the market, and not all of them can capture and manage all your assets. Our enterprise customers are finding success when their catalogs are:

1. Able to support all types of integration asset (e.g. REST, SOAP, Async, data)
2. Upstream of pipelines and runtime so they are freed of vendor lock-in and can deploy anywhere
3. Connected to the rest of their enterprise architecture

Here’s the goal state of a connected catalog of all APIs:

And what value does a connected catalog provide you? There’s 4 main areas:

1. Visibility of integration assets available – the view of coverage and gaps, what is good and bad, and how to quickly improve the assets and the scalable practice
2. Speed – for consuming developers; quickly find and consume what they’re looking for and – for providers; reliably design and deploy new assets. *Added benefit of decentralized governance, standards, policies, feedback baked into a full lifecycle
3. Understand asset dependencies, track end-to-end lineage, know who provides/consumes functionality, and make targeted decisions on roadmap and changes – from API → microservice → runtime → application
4. ?Create a portfolio of abstracted consistent designs with reliable integration interfaces – the enterprise needs flexibility and scale on integration flavors, industry standards, changing organization and vendor structures.

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Join us live on the webinar next week when Jeremy and Sayee will be sharing industry tips on how to make this a reality, and answering questions such as:

• If you have a catalog of different integrations assets like APIs, Events, Data connectors etc., is that too complex to be practical?
• How does this differ from other offerings like Developer Portals and API Marketplaces?
• Which roles benefit from this sort of catalog?
• How are other enterprises actually doing this? What are their lessons learned?