Post on 07-Aug-2015
www.soa.com/atmosphere
Today’s Audience
• You work for a company and are wondering how to leverage APIs– How do you create a compelling case for your business?– How do you go about building an API?– How do you release it into the wild?
• You are an App Developer– What does the API do for me?– Can I trust this API?
• You are one of our competitors– They are serving beer in the lobby
www.soa.com/atmosphere
A Case Study – SOA Software
• SOA Software built its first product in 2002• Thriving software product business
– Direct Sales to Enterprise– On premise
• Profitable
www.soa.com/atmosphere
Existing Market Landscape
• SOA Management• Registry/Repository• Governance
• We saw this market evolve from SOA Management to a larger, and more complex market over time
www.soa.com/atmosphere
Change
• Driving forces for change
– Encroachment on our existing business model
– Different users and buyers
– A natural evolution for SOA
www.soa.com/atmosphere
Emerging Market Landscape
• (Cloud) Integration Brokers/Brokerages – these are the middle-men, like SOA Software, that are offering value-added services for hard-earned cash
• API Providers – these are businesses that expose APIs• App Developers – these are internal groups, partners and
developers
• Typical patterns that we are seeing:– B2E – business to employee. More and more businesses are
leveraging mobile devices (personal or not) in the workplace– B2B – the traditional partner integration space with an emphasis
on mobile, devices– B2D – business to developer. This is a pattern that exploits a long
term consumer-facing strategy
www.soa.com/atmosphere
Challenges• Motivating the business
– Threats do not always translate well to opportunities• Channel Development
– Funding– Sales– Support– Profit
• Leveraging existing technology– Temptation is to throw everything out and start again– Don’t forget that while technology changes, the problems
largely stay the same– New requirements: SaaS, Multi-tenancy, UI, Security,
Market and Competitive needs, etc.
www.soa.com/atmosphere
Our Approach
• We have a good, scalable, proven SOA runtime technology that is capable of REST, Mobile, etc.
– An on-premise software product is tough to build and support– We wanted to leverage this as much as possible. This has years of
QA and works like a charm
• Our management server is targeted for internal use, behind the firewall by operations and IT.
– We decided to create a new server that leveraged the latest technologies and met the requirements of SaaS, multi-tenancy and federation. It is impossible to retrofit these capabilities and we needed a whole new product.
www.soa.com/atmosphere
Our Approach
• We set about designing the API as a product itself: the ‘Atmosphere Platform API’
• Since we were building an API Management platform anyway we could be our own customer to prove out the technology
• As an example, we needed the following API Management Requirements ourselves:– App and API Discovery – we are an App, we
had an API– Community Management– Debugging, Testing, Monitoring– Security– Policy Management– Document Management
www.soa.com/atmosphere
A new product for a new channel
• Has both enterprise maturity and the feel of a new product• Is targeted to a new audience• Supports multiple channels• The API allows the product to be deployed as SaaS, on-premise,
and hybrid• Enables new business models, including federations
www.soa.com/atmosphere
Summary
• Start with a compelling business strategy– New channels– New markets– New models– Risks and Threats
• Treat your API as a product– Extend your brand– Put yourself in the developer’s shoes, think about how they can
make money• Leverage your API as a platform
– Provides both stickiness and scaling strategy– Provides technical longevity - as soon as you launch a product, it is
out of date. An API has a longer life.
www.soa.com/atmosphere
Thanks…
Alistair Farquharson, CTO, SOA Softwareajf@soa.com@afarqu@atmosphere_api @SOASoftwareInc