As I talk to more mainstream customers privately, and engage with producers of APIs as part of my API Evangelist conversations, I am realizing just how tech focused my storytelling has been over the years. Enterprises are producing and consuming APIs, but rarely do they actually care about the API—they are really just interested in the resulting integrations. I’d say the web, mobile, desktop, and AI application API narratives are powerful and are beneficial, but really people just want their data, content, and algorithms baked into their customers’ existing services.
I am working overtime to evolve myself beyond my technically dominated API storytelling. I am hyper aware that the future of the API industries is about alignment with business stakeholders and evolving beyond the numerous very technical messages that API service providers have crafted over the last fifteen years. As part of this I am latching onto the term integrations. Business stakeholders I am talking about understand APIs lightly, but they aren’t as obsessed with producing and consuming APIs as they are to integrate with APIs. It really is a higher level term that could be you are both producing and consuming API, or you may just be consuming APIs. It is less about the technical or even the business details of APIs, and about the outcomes of using APIs, going well beyond just desktop, web, mobile, device, and even artificial intelligence applications.
The folks I am talking with care less about design-first vs code-first, RESTfulness, and the technical details, and care more about efficiency, consistency, reliability, and being able to bring on new customers quicker. This is all forcing me to speak more in business terms, while also not abandoning all the work I’ve been doing on the technical details. My policies are how I am aligning the technical with the business details, working to translate consistent HTTP status codes to cost savings delivering new integrations, and how inconsistent authentication will slow down integrations while making them more costly. I am translating every Spectral rule I have into something that makes sense to business stakeholders. I am thinking about policies that span both producer and consumer perspective, labeling them as integration policies. I am determined to illustrate API governance rules as most saved or lost on the way towards specific business outcomes.
Integrations are an area I will do more investigation. I’ve long turned into integration pages as part of the API portal experience, and when you are integrating between two 3rd-party service providers I’ve studied Zapier, and other integration platforms as a service provider (iPaaS). However I will need to dive into how API producers approach their API integration strategy, decide which services and platform they prioritize, and how they approach the business and technical details. I think that my API producer narrative focusing on delivering the resources and capabilities you need in desktop, web, mobile, device, and artificial intelligence applications is strong, but I think a similar API integration story could go even wider. I feel like focusing on having your valuable data, content, and algorithms safely available in other services and platforms in a way that protects your business interests is the leading aspect of doing APIs 2025 and beyond.
I think emphasizing applications or integrations will vary from industry to industry, and enterprise to enterprise, but I think the old build it and they will come to build the next killer application is pretty tired and only spoke to a specific audience. I think the API integrations, and putting my valuable digital resources and capabilities into other systems and platforms and generating new revenue, and strengthening the connection with existing customers, has broad appeal. I am still working on connecting all the business dots with the technical details of API integration between two 3rd-party APIs, as well as 1st-party and 3rd-party APIs, but it is already proving to easily map to business objectives. As I work with existing customers to understand their needs, and the realities of the industries they operate in, I’ll continue going deep to evolve my strategies, policies, rules, and guidance to speak to the API integration narrative. I think this work will pay off down the road by helping me bridge the API producer and consumer realms, but also the business and engineering sides of how enterprises do business.
