How You Can Achieve Business Growth With APIs
With technology advancing with each passing year, businesses are adopting various intermediaries to aid in their application development like application programming interface (API).
Let us start by understanding API
What is an API?
API, as mentioned above, is a software intermediary that allows two applications to communicate with each other with a few predefined protocols and definitions.
What does API do?
API lets your product or service communicate with other products or services without knowing how the information is implemented on the other end.
In simple words, API saves time and money and provides flexibility to your product and also makes development and design easy.
Integrating the APIs to products ensures easy management of the same as you just have to integrate it to the product and access the data from the resource server and present it on the product.
API also provides the opportunity for innovation and addition of new features to the products.
How does API help to grow business?
As API integration adds new components to the existing architecture it helps business and IT teams to make a product stronger and more efficient.
Businesses often need changes quickly with respect to a shift in the digital market where you see competitors continuously upgrading with new applications. To ensure you are still a part of the rat race, it is necessary to make a rapid development and deployment of innovative features. This is where the role of API stands out. It can help increase the speed of development as cloud native apps can be added as features through APIs.
API has proven to be the most simplified way to connect your own infrastructure through cloud native apps. With this, you can also share your data with your customers and other external users. For eg: Google Map API. Apart from adding new values to your business, they help enterprises monetize data for public.
We illustrate this with an example
Imagine a shoe distributor company that sells shoes to retail stores. In this case, the shoe distributor can facilitate retailers with a cloud app, which provides data of product availability. Note that the cloud application can be expensive and time consuming to develop as well as requires maintenance. As an alternative, the shoe distributor can provide an API to check the stock availability in real time.
A glance at the benefits of this approach:
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With API, customers can access the aggregate information of the inventory stock at a single place.
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The distributor can make changes to the internal systems without impacting retailers as long as the APIs don't change output.
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The retail stores can also develop their own app where they can integrate this API.
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These APIs can also integrate with the existing cloud apps, which retail stores and customers may be using.
This approach can result in higher sales and add new opportunities to the business.
API opens up access to your business resources while maintaining security and control over who can access the data. The API release policy can be divided into private, partner, public.
Private:
The API is meant only to be used internally. It provides control to companies as only they can use it for their internal business.
Partner:
These APIs are only shared with specific business partners or customers. Such APIs provide additional revenue streams without compromising on service quality.
Public:
This API is accessible to everyone. Third parties can develop their apps that interact with the API and it can be a source of innovation for them.
Innovation using APIs
APIs add new revenue channels to your business. It expands the reach of your business brand. By adding the external collaboration into your business using APIs your business can see skyrocketing growth. Connect with us to know how.
