The next frontier of API investment will not be focused on artificial intelligence, but filling in everything enterprises take for granted (and often do not even use) with API gateways when it comes to HTTP or REST APIs, but this round of investment will be focused on event-driven APIs. The road from 2006 through 2016 centered around moving on from an internal enterprise service oriented architecture (SOA) approach to managing digital resources to one that embraced the web and opened up your business to partners and when it makes sense, to the public. When you look out across the latest round of API investment occurring by startups as well as venture capital you see the backfilling of these areas we’ve long had for HTTP APIs, but now the focus is on event-driven APIs.
- Analytics - Being able to measure and see what matters around API usage via a dashboard.
- Composition - Grouping and organizing events in ways that are aligned with domains of business.
- Monetization - Being able to charge for access based upon events and the number of events.
- Authorization - Getting more nuanced when it comes to who has access to what resources.
- Value Exchange - Invoicing consumers based upon the value contributed or consumed via APIs.
All of these capabilities were beginning to be baked into API gateways between 2006 and 2010, enabling new business models to emerge around different types of APIs. By 2015 these gateways were getting communized and the great “unbundling” of other capabilities such as portals, documentation, virtualization, client generation, and other elements began. These areas of unbundling are also part of this backfilling of API capabilities occurring around event-driven APIs, but this post is just focused on the business, revenue, and value generation portion of this discussion, which is now being applied in the HTTP realm with Webhooks, but also rapidly being expanded to TCP, HTTP/2, HTTP/3, and other protocols.
