Completing our digital supply chain and factory floor API analogy, the last legs are the wholesale and retail distribution channels. Your API developer portal(s) are your wholesale distribution channels, but it is important not to forget about the applications you develop representing your retail distribution channels. The raw resources (internal APIs) and resources and capabilities from suppliers (3rd-party cloud and on-premise APIs) are combined with your products (3rd-party and 1st-party) APIs that are used in the desktop, web, mobile, and artificial intelligence applications you and your wholesale partners develop and maintain.
Once your digital resources and capabilities are available to leave the factory via your API gateway they are made available via the catalog published to your API developer portal. These portals are primarily publicly available as part of your online domain, but could also be made available internally, privately with partners, and offered via regional portals to distribute your digital products to specific geographic locations. API portals are the wholesale B2B access by customers to your digital resources and capabilities. These customers might be internal consumers, come from trusted vendors and partners who extend the reach of your business, or they could be 3rd-party developers coming from the industry you operate and the community of developers you’ve cultivated over time. Your ability to go from raw resource and supplier resources to finished product distributed to your wholesale developer portal will define how you do business, and decide your leadership position with the industry you operate in.
Beyond your wholesale B2B offerings the API resources you develop for use in desktop, web, mobile, and artificial intelligence applications represents the retail experience you are offering to consumers. These applications might be used internally, or made available publicly to partners and end-users, but they depend on the quality, reliability, and value that exists across the raw resources, supplier resources, and products you produce via your digital API factory floor and supply chain. Think of the products available in retail chains you know, and which ones offer the experience that matters. The experience users find within your desktop, web, mobile, and artificial intelligence applications will be defined by your API digital supply chain and factory floor. The freshness and demand for your digital experiences will be defined by your API digital supply chain and factory floor. Applications are the cumulative quality, performance, and velocity that exists across your digital API supply chain, factory floor, and distribution channels.
Think about all the collective energy that was put into defining and optimizing the supply chain, factory floor, and distribution channels of leading brands over the last 200 years. Now think about how much work you have put into your digital supply chain, factory, floor, and distribution channels. Think of the effort of business leadership, lawyers, and other stakeholders in the business contracts that defined business occurring over the last 200 years. Now think of the work you have in front of you to define the business and technical API contracts you need to optimize your digital supply chain, factory, floor, and distribution channel. This is what I am here to help you with. I have the framework and properties of the business and technical API contracts you need to properly define your digital supply chain, factory, floor, and distribution channels, establish the guard rails for your teams producing APIs, but also automate the aspects of operations that can run itself. Let’s get to work doing what is needed to ensure your digital API distribution channels reflect the enterprise vision you have for tomorrow, and not where you stand today.
