Innovation is a topic of conversation in almost every enterprise, but a related topic that sometimes goes under-discussed is co-innovation—that is, the idea that enterprises can unlock a lot of powerful business innovation by partnering outside the organization. Often called a digital ecosystems strategy, this tactic involves different participants sharing data, functionality, and other digital assets for symbiotic benefit.
2020 has been among the most disruptive years business leaders have ever confronted, with many enterprises absorbing several years of digital transformation over just a few months. These ongoing efforts have not been easy, with numerous organizations finding their existing resources and workflows won’t scale and don’t allow them to move quickly or responsively enough. They need to rethink how transformation occurs and how different parts of the workforce can participate.
Our recent CIO survey with Oxford Economics contained a few takeaways that stood out to me: most companies are using API-first strategies, and those most committed to this concept report faster innovation and greater value from business partnerships. Even so, the survey indicates that a healthy minority of enterprises still think of APIs in integration-first terms.
Over the last several years, as digital services and interfaces have become the primary way businesses interact with their customers, maintaining ‘business as usual’ has demanded digital transformation. In difficult times such as these, however, it may be tempting to put digital transformation projects on pause until budget surpluses return. This is a mistake.
APIs are a critical component of any enterprise’s digital transformation strategy. They can drive customer engagement, accelerate time to market of new services, power innovation and unlock new business opportunities. Therefore, choosing the right API management platform is critical to running a successful API program, and research from industry analyst firms like Forrester Research can help enterprises evaluate and choose the right solution.
Worldwide, businesses are adapting to the new market conditions by transforming their current operating models to meet the new consumer demands and improve productivity, all while still focusing on achieving growth. In this new era, taking an outside-in approach to digital business ecosystems can help organizations harness their existing resources and relationships to drive new innovations and efficiency.
Among forward-looking software developers, Envoy has become ubiquitous as a high-performance pluggable proxy, providing improved networking and observability capability for increased services traffic. Built on the learnings of HAProxy and nginx, Envoy is now an official Cloud Native Computing Foundation project, and has many fans—including among users of our Apigee API management platform.
As most software developers no doubt know, there are two primary models for API design: RPC and REST. Regardless of model, most modern APIs are implemented by mapping them in one way or another to the same HTTP protocol. It has also become common for RPC API designs to adopt one or two ideas from HTTP while staying within the RPC model, which has increased the range of choices that an API designer faces. This post tries to explain the choices, and give guidance on how to choose between them.
