API Consumption Matters: Forrester Report About API Management

A Forrester report "Closing The Gap Between API Development And API Consumption" (commissioned by Axway) published in March 2022 looks at the current challenges and opportunities around API consumption. For this report, over 300 IT and business decision-makers were asked where they stand on closing the gap between API development and API consumption.

Key Findings

• Consuming APIs effectively leads to increased revenue. 86% of API decision-makers know the value of APIs isn’t in developing them, but in consuming them. Yet they struggle to gain API adoption.
• Critical technology and business challenges cause a gap between development and consumption of APIs, resulting in missed business goals and an inability to make data-driven API investment decisions.
• Vendor expertise and effective API management can close that gap, increasing API usage, revenue, and business value while decreasing API complexity and costs.

Overview

Early in their digital transformation journeys, many companies focused on building application program interfaces (APIs) and opening up available information. Now there is a shift to concentrate more on increasing adoption and consumption of those APIs to bring real value to the business. This value through API consumption leads to greater ROI.

To be successful in this next phase of digital transformation, companies need to do more than build APIs: They must also make it easy to catalog them, secure them, and discover them to drive adoption and reuse. In addition, they need to be able to analyze usage and performance to guide future API investments.

Closing the development/consumption gap requires organizations to address some common business and technical challenges, including:

• An API strategy that’s not driven by business needs and desired results.
• Minimal API reuse due to development silos, poor discoverability, and difficult onboarding.
• No way to measure API success or failure.

Conclusion

To close the gap between API development and consumption, API decision-makers need to understand and remove the barriers that are keeping it open.

• Simply creating APIs is not a recipe for success. The value of APIs is in their adoption and consumption.
• Low API adoption is largely due to a lack of insightful data on API usage and performance.
• A business-led approach to API strategy that focuses on API consumption is critical to success in achieving high-level business goals.
• API management technology combined with business and digital expertise from a vendor is valuable to developing more consumable APIs and closing the gap.