July 7, 2020January 26, 2023

The Value of APIs with Raymond Peng

The Value of APIs

Businesses often struggle with breaking out of the mindset that APIs are solely meant for integrations. In this episode, Chris Hood chats with Raymond Peng, a Global Value Advisor at Google Cloud, to understand how businesses can leverage APIs to improve efficiencies, increase revenue, and navigate changing market demands.

Many enterprise technology leaders value APIs primarily for their role in enterprise application integration (EAI), in which the objective is to interconnect applications across a company’s aggregate IT environment to facilitate the flow of information. Older iterations of EAI mechanisms, such as the enterprise service bus (ESB), have been largely supplanted by API gateways.

APIs are many things. Yes, they’re a middleware technology — but APIs are also software products that developers leverage to combine functionality and data into new digital experiences, and, most important to my discussion here, APIs are the primary mechanisms that allow information to be connected to people at scale across billions of devices active in today’s digital ecosystems. It’s no exaggeration, in other words, to say that, far from being IT minutiae, APIs play a critical role in satisfying the needs of customers and driving growth.

Though it is true that APIs have been a boon to EAI, business and IT leaders should ask, what is the value of integration in the first place? Time and money should not be wasted on integrating for the sake of checking off boxes that indicate some internal gap or another has been remediated. If an API program is driven solely by the desire to link applications, it often ends up crafting one-size-fits-all APIs built according to what works best for the company’s internal infrastructure but that largely disregard the needs of customers.

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