The nascent API Economy is rapidly maturing and is shaping up to be both promising and challenging.
Meeting the challenges of The API Economy will be as important for customers as embracing the personal computer was in the 1980s or embracing the mobile and tablet trends are today.
Customers are faced with the challenge of understanding the distinction of being both an API consumer and an API Provider. Further it has become imperative that customers begin to put infrastructure in place—hopefully from a trusted API consumer or provider technology vendor—to manage the complexity and security issues involved with embracing The API Economy.
We refer to this dual API approach—the API Provider and the API Consumer—as the enterprise inside-out and the enterprise outside-in.
There are credible third-party vendors beginning to fill that market to meet this gap between the imperative and the reality for the customer.
Customers should engage to understand and implement the technologies for both enterprise inside-out (API Provider) and enterprise outside-in (API Consumer) as soon as possible.
