With the explosion of mobile and the emergence of a connected world, organisations around the globe are being pushed to re-think their traditional business models. Now traditional business models are under pressure from technology innovations that disintermediate the value chains and threaten significant value pools.
This is a right time for organisations to take advantage of the API economy and realize the potential of APIs in terms of supporting technologies in enabling the Connected Business.
Speaking on the topic of Connected Business and the API Economy – Challenges and Opportunities, during the recent WSO2con 2014 in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Rana Peries Head of Innovation and Digital Financial Services Technology, Asia, Commonwealth Bank said that enterprise community must take advantage from the emerging API economy and create opportunities for themselves.
“The API economy is an economy where companies expose their business services in the form of APIs to external parties in order to generate additional revenue. Today’s customers are demanding a more personalized service which is integrated to their lifestyles this is translating towards delivery of next generation services such as taxi services, banking and payment industry etc,’’ he explained.
In the connected economy, customers surely have a greater choice. In such a scenario, monetizing the API holds the key to succeed on the long run. We have great examples in the case of Facebook, API enriches the product and content, API is free to use. With Salesforce – the API provides an alternative way to access the product and improves the distribution, on the other hand, in the case of Amazon Web Services, the API is the core value of the product, and the user pays a transaction fee based on the usage.
“As winning in the API economy becomes critical, Gartner predicts that 75 per cent of fortune 500 enterprises will open APIs by 2014. And in this new API economy, those without an API strategy will be left behind,” he added.
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