The evolution and adoption of enterprise digital transformation have made APIs critical for integration within and across enterprises as well as for product/service innovation. As APIs grow in scale and complexity, establishing a developer portal would significantly ease the process of their roll-out and adoption. This perspective paper explores the significance of an API Developer Portal in the modern digital landscape driving the API economy.

A Developer Portal makes it easier to understand APIs, reduces integration time, and supports developers in training and resolving API-related issues. This provides significant business value by improving agility and enhancing customer experience. With the help of a Portal, enterprises can efficiently publish and consume APIs and enable their integration with incremental API versions. This will ensure benefit from all digital investments.

In an increasingly API-driven economy, an all-inclusive API Developer Portal can differentiate an enterprise from its competitors, help build trust with partners, and achieve long-term success. Depending on the API platforms being used, enterprises could adopt a built-in platform or develop a custom one. Developing a custom API Portal would be easy at the start. However, developing enhanced features would entail a significant investment of time and resources. Hence, to make the right decisions and succeed in the broader API implementation/integration journey, a well-thought-out approach is necessary.

To learn more about the key drivers, components and features, implementation options and potential benefits of API Developer Portals, download the perspective paper here.

Selecting an appropriate path for an application or a portfolio of applications is one of the most critical decision points in a cloud journey. Assessing the nature and criticality of an existing application is usually the starting place. Another critical factor to consider is the implementation (migration) cost and time for each path to cloud. The four cloud adoption options are re-host, re-platform, re-factor and re-write in the order of increasing cost, effort, cloud benefits, and TCO reduction. Out of these, re-host usually does not involve code change and is relatively simple.

Mapping cloud operating metrics into a 3x3 matrix is a good starting point on planning for a cloud journey. In this matrix, the cloud operating metrics would move to the right if they are critical for customer intelligence applications; that would be an X factor. Another critical dimension while planning cloud migration is identifying the interface dependencies between selected application(s) and others – both inbound and outbound. These could be synchronous, asynchronous or batch.

Understanding the application architecture, its internal organization, and inter-dependencies are critical before migration. This can be a very complex and labor-intensive task if done manually and can be error prone. Not fully understanding the existing code can lead to issues related to transactions, data corruption, session handling, and performance.

To read more on the top challenges and their mitigations in the cloud journey, download the perspective paper here.