Your Wholesale API For Sale In The Major API Marketplaces

I have been talking about selling wholesale APIs for some time now, allowing your potential customers to pick and choose exactly the API infrastructure they need, and develop their own virtualized API stacks. I'm not talking about publishing your retail API into marketplaces like Mashpe, I'm talking about making your API deployable and manageable on all the major cloud providers. 

You see this shift in business with a recent AWS email I got telling me about multi-year contracs for SaaS and APIs. Right now there are 70 SaaS products on AWS Marketplace, but from the email I can tell that Amazon is really trying to expand it's API offerings as well. When you deploy an API solution using the AWS Marketplace, and a customer signs up for a one, two, or three year contract, they don't pay for the underlying AWS infrastructure, just for the SaaS, or API solution. I will have to expore more to see if this is just absorbed by the API operator, or AWS working to incentivize this type of wholesale API deployment in their marketplace, and locking in providers and consumers.

I'm still learning about how Amazon is shifting the landscpe for deploying and managing APIs in this wholesale, almost API broker type of way. I recently came across the AWS Serverless API Portal, which is meant to augment the delivery of SaaS or API solutions in this way. With this model you could be in the business of deploying API developer portals for companies, and fill ingthe catalog with a variety of wholesale API resources, from a varietiy of providers--opening up a pretty interesting opportunity for white label APIs, and API brokers.

As I'm studying this new approach to deploying and managing APIs using marketplaces like this, I'm also noticing a shift towards deliving more algorithmic APIs, with machine learning, artificial intelligence, and other voodoo as the engine--resulting in a shift towards machine learning API marketplaces. I really need to carve off time to think about API deployment and management in this way. I've already begun looking at what it takes to deploy bare bones, wholesale APIs using AWS, Google, Heroku, or Azure clouds, but I really haven't invested much in the business side of all of this, soewhere Amazon seems to be slightly ahead of the curve in.