1. Write a 1 page paper on th API Economy. Why is the IT
industry excited by it and what types of companies are basing
their business around API's. What is the future of API 's as it
relates to other technologies you have learned about in class?
Place your paper in the dropbox by due date.
Solution
Application programming interfaces (APIs) have been elevated
from a development technique to a business model driver and
boardroom consideration. An organization’s core assets can be
reused, shared, and monetized through APIs that can extend the
reach of existing services or provide new revenue streams. APIs
should be managed like a product—one built on top of a
potentially complex technical footprint that includes legacy and
third-party systems and data.
Managing the transformation:
Openness, agility, flexibility, and scalability are moving from
good hygiene to lifeand-death priorities. Tenets of modern APIs
are becoming enterprise mandates: Write loosely coupled,
stateless, cacheable, uniform interfaces and expect them to be
reused, potentially by players outside of the organization.
Technology teams striving for speed and quality are finally
investing in an API management backbone—that is, a platform

2. to:
• Create, govern, and deploy APIs: versioning, discoverability,
and clarity of scope and purpose
• Secure, monitor, and optimize usage: access control, security
policy enforcement, routing, caching, throttling (rate limits and
quotas), instrumentation, and analytics
• Market, support, and monetize assets: manage sales, pricing,
metering, billing, and key or token provisioning.
Why is the ITIndutsryexcited:
Gartner predicts that by the end of 2014 75% of the Fortune
1000 will offer public Web APIs and that by 2016 50% of B2B
collaboration will take place through Web APIs. Whether or not
these predictions come to pass to make such predictions shows
the incredible growth rate of Web APIs (also called Business
APIs), as we create an API Economy. What is driving this rapid
adoption of APIs? The answer is a need for Speed and Reach.
Businesses need to respond quickly to market demands and
opportunities with little impact to their existing systems.
Changes required supporting the latest innovations in Mobile or
other mechanisms allowing customers to interact with the
business cannot require changes to the back end systems that
are running the business or it would cause the support to take
too long to bring to market. Businesses also want to extend their
reach partnering with others to create value added applications
that can be brought to market. Any single business only has so

3. many programmers. Why not expand your work force with
others outside the company to create new and innovative
applications that send more business to you? This is
accomplished by creating an API Economy where you choose to
expose selected assets as APIs, which can be consumed by
application developers who add further value, and subsequently
make their application available to new customers. If this
“supply chain” of assets provides value to the business, the app
developer, and the end consumer, then we will be successful in
reaching new markets that would not have been possible with a
limited internal work force. This is not to say that making APIs
available internally is not also important.
For example, let’s look at Cars.com – an online web site or app
that assists with the car buying process. To accomplish this
Cars.com uses APIs from many businesses. They may use:
An automobile company API to search for cars with certain
characteristics (style, gas mileage, price, etc.)
Providing APIs Is Only For Internet Startups And Giants(What
Type of companies)
An organization does not need to be a startup, internet giant, or
government agency to be concerned with APIs. There are many
other types of companies with great API programs, such as:
Bechtel, a construction and engineering firm
Bechtel Corp., the largest construction and engineering firm in
the United States, engages an API strategy to facilitate access to

4. its monolithic system. Their strategy allows the company to
accelerate productivity, enable mobile access with up-to-date
relevant data, and diminish paper-based management in the
field.
Dun & Bradstreet, a business information company
Dun & Bradstreet, Inc. is an American public company that
provides commercial data to businesses on credit history,
business-to-business sales and marketing, counterparty risk
exposure, supply chain management, lead scoring, and social
identity matching. Using APIs, D&B provides data easily and
directly into their customer systems, applications, CRM, or ERP
— regardless of technologies used.
Marvel Entertainment, a character based entertainment company
The Marvel Entertainment public API allows access to data on
over 30,000 comics and 7,000 series. Everything from cover art,
character info, and comic book crossover events are accessible
via the API.
Absolut Vodka, a spirits company
Absolut Vodka provides the ADDb: Absolut Drink Database.
This is an API for Absolut’s drink recipes and other related
assets that reduce their advertising campaigns’ time to market.
what is the future of API's as it relates to other technologies
The use case for mobile APIs
Lane points to Netflix as a great example of how APIs can
revolutionize a business and even an entire industry in just a

5. few years. The streaming video provider needed to move out of
the data center and into the cloud to leverage an elastic, highly
scalable infrastructure with availability in every major
geographic region. The company achieved this by defining all
its assets and resources as APIs. This allowed the company to
move all the bits and pieces in a granular way out of the DC and
into the cloud. Because APIs allow an organization to focus on
core assets first and then retool as needed for various endpoints,
Netflix was then in an ideal position to become the guru of
device delivery. The organization now delivers content to more
than 700 different devices – and not all of them are traditional
‘mobile’.
Embedded technology and the future of APIs
The ability to bring the functionality of APIs to a broad range
of devices beyond the scope of mobile is already here. APIs are
necessary to make any application “visible” to voice command
programs like Siri. These programming interfaces are in the
Fitbit wireless activity tracker you clip onto your jacket and
will eventually become the standard for helping your doctor
monitor your health remotely. Embedded, API based, Web-
enabled technology is showing up in more and more everyday
devices from your smart refrigerator to the console in your car.
Eventually, the API won’t have to focus on being mobile all the
time because it will already be embedded wherever you go.
Shipping APIs: enabling delivery tracking

6. Taxation APIs: enabling global retail as businesses
automatically charge the right tax rates for customers, or help
retailers file the right tax reports
E-commerce API platforms: enabling businesses to establish a
direct channel to shoppers from their product catalog and
shepherd them through to online sales and delivery
Payment APIs: enabling smart, secure, performant solutions for
online checkout workflows