In the Digital Transformation age, massive use of APIs becomes essential to streamline business processes, drive business innovation and add value to promote competitiveness.
In the quest to improve users’ digital experience, companies and their technology partners are constantly challenged to meet customers’ growing expectations. However, this must be achieved by keeping expenses under control and using their human and technical resources efficiently.
One tool that makes possible an optimized use of their analytical capacity is the automation of programming processes. And this is where APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) show up. They are a set of computer protocols that establish how two software applications will communicate with each other, for data and information exchange.
According to BBVA API Market figures[1] the number of public APIs had an exponential growth in the last few decades, growing from 299 in 2006 to 13,146 in 2015. This increase in the use of APIs will be the first key step in achieving the automation of programming processes.
In the Digital Transformation age, massive use of APIs becomes essential to streamline business processes, drive business innovation and add value to promote competitiveness. Additionally, APIs will allow companies to optimize the use of bandwidth, storage, besides letting them adjust policies and traffic patterns dynamically and in real time.
According to Market Research Future[2], the APIs market will get to US$763 MM by 2022 and will become the main peer-to-peer connectivity means.
This will have different impacts. On one hand, Sales and Support teams will shift their focus, moving from human intervention to code-driven solutions. Thus, interactions among machines will release the analytical capacity of human resources to allocate them to more critical issues, such as innovation.
Likewise, expansion of API markets will provide peer-to-peer environments to facilitate emergence of strategic alliances built around the integration of automated systems and the creation of new services.
With APIs, companies undergoing an accelerated digitalization process will be able to improve their business management, restructure their processes in favor of innovation and efficiently design creative ways to get closer to their customers.
In this process, improving the convenience and efficiency of our customers` tasks is core to our objectives as a company. To do this, it is imperative that those who plan to benefit from this trend and from the heyday of APIs have the network infrastructure and cloud capabilities necessary to operate with the full freedom to adjust their technological offer to a demand that is increasingly more demanding and fragmented.
[1] https://www.bbvaapimarket.com/es/mundo-api/infografia-que-es-una-api/
[2] https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/cloud-api-market-2572
Autor:
Maria Eugenia Lasta
VP Business Transformation
Lumen, LATAM
