What Does "API as a Product" Mean?
Though we tend to think of APIs in a very technical way, they are increasingly combined within the context of business offerings and values. Accordingly, many are recontextualizing things to treat APIs more like products.
An API is essentially a traditional service, delivering capability to the end user without sharing the risks and costs associated with the service. Appropriately, even if the API provider does not function as a business per se, we should treat the API as a business asset rather than an amorphous codebase. When the API provider is in fact a business, there’s only a greater reason to do so.
To help understand why this is valuable, and to leverage the results of such a shift in thinking for better systems and technology, let’s define some business terms within the context of the API industry.
What makes an API a product?
Lots of things. And as is the case with any product, whether it’s a smartphone or a sports car or a lawnmower, the success of an API product depends both on how the API is designed and how the API is marketed and maintained. Put another way, an API becomes a product when it is managed like one.
How can we help you?
Meshing our horizontal experience on both Salesforce and Mulesoft we help our customers tailor their personalized API community experience.
With Anypoint API Community Manager, we help you build and operate communities around your APIs for developers and partners, both inside and outside of your organization, who write applications that use your APIs.
API Community Manager is powered by Salesforce Community Cloud and provides customization, branding, marketing, and engagement capabilities to serve the different needs of your developer audiences.
APIs cataloged in Anypoint Exchange can be surfaced in API Community Manager for developers to discover them and use them to manage client applications, API access credentials, and consumption metrics.
