The Business Side of the API Economy: Enabling the Agile, Connected Enterprise

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our webinar, the business side of the API economy, enabling the air trial connected enterprise API management, the business enabler. This webinar is supported by layer seven technologies speakers. Today are me Martin Kuppinger for and principal Analyst at and met LAR enterprise architect at layer seven. Before we start with the webinar, I just want to talk a little bit about keeping a call and provide some housekeeping information. So could a call as Analyst company, we are providing enterprise it research advisory services, such support and networking for it. Professionals amongst the services outside of our research and the advisory. There are various ones and amongst these ones, there's the, there are two which are upcoming, right? One will be the information, risk and security summit. End of November in Frankfurt. It's about our leadership in the very interactive sessions. There's a lot of peer networking, devoted and focused on really on end users and, and the, and yeah, giving them the opportunity to talk with the Analyst and their peers.
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And usually it's a good idea. So once you have a question to enter this so that we have a, a good list of questions to start was when we entered the U a session that directly leads us to the agenda of today. The agenda like in most called webinars is split into three parts. In the first part, I will talk about the ABC, the agile business connected and why they connected or extended or open enterprise requires API management. And the second part, Matt McLarty will talk about business cases. The real world, examples for customers benefiting from API management centreing will be very much about, okay, this API stuff. It sounds a little technical, but in fact, it's about enabling business. It's enabling the business to do what they need to do to interact with other priorities, to open up for new business models, mobile enablement, etcetera, et cetera.
So this would be really be the storyline of today's webinar. And I think it's very important and interesting to take a little bit of different angle on this entire topic of API management, not only the technical perspective on why do we do this? Why does business need this entire thing? As I said to sir, the part that will be the Q and a session, and I right now want directly start with my presentation within this webinar. So when we look at today's business challenges, there are various challenges. And clearly these are at all challenges, businesses facing, but I think it shows a lot of the, the major challenges, which you will find in virtually any organizations. So there are some at the middle, some permanent challenges such as globalization. So your competitive landscape is changing Q2, globalization. You have to make business in other countries maybe than ever before.
And overall, not only because of globalization overall competitive landscape really changes. So it becomes faster. It becomes broader. There are new parties and market, etcetera clearly just depends a little bit on the industry, but most organizations today are really dealing with that challenge are facing that challenge. And there's the permanent challenge of growth. So your investors, your stakeholders, whoever they expect growth, they expect clearly also earnings, which is then sort of another challenge. So increasing the earnings is one of the other challenges. The hand for talent is the challenge in many, many industries today, many countries, it's a real big challenge because there's not enough talent sort of ins on the market. And we have some other occasional challenges such as economic germo. When we look back over the last few years, we had in fact, two financial crisis, we have to changes in regulation.
Cetera. So business is under pressure and business has to react on this, that there are requirements for the business to remain success successful, that there are several success factors we have to look at. And these success factors when we look at them, so fitting to the permanent requirements, there is this extended or connected or open enterprise. This is one of these requirements. One of the key success vectors for any organization, we have to open up organizations, communicate with our customers to communicate with business partners. Etcetera. When I look at, at, at our advisory customers here at cubical, then virtually every organization we are working with is really challenged by how can I open up my enterprise? How can I connect? How can I extend my enterprise? There's another thing, which is the agility, the agility for growth. But also when we look at things like economic turmoils, the agility for rapid adaptation to changing, changing environment, changing economical environment, etcetera.
So agility is one of the major challenges for any organization. We have innovation of an important thing. We have really compliance cost-saving collaboration and communication. But when we look at the two things in the middle, which are disconnected or extended stuff, which is atactually, then these are two of the really major requirements. And that's why, why I want to talk about the ABC. So this really the ABC thing it's the, a trial business connect is collected business, have to be at trial in these days and they have to connect. Both things are tied together. So being at trial means that I can deal in a flexible way with my business partners, cetera, et cetera. So this is clearly, it means I have to connect and connectivity on the handles. The one thing which is very important to support. So we have to be able to connect, to be able to support the, so these things are tied together, regardless of, as we talk about the open enterprise connected enterprise extended enterprise, regardless of which term we use, it's all about the same stuff. It's about an organization which can connect to all types of, to us, to all types of identities, your employees, your business partners, your customers, your prospects, whatever it's about.
It's about the, the ability to deal with various deployment models, cetera, etcetera. This is really the challenge we are seeing here. So agile it's about business model, business processes, communication channels, organization, it applications and apps, cetera, all these things have to be agile. We need more flexibility in the business model. We need more flexibility in the business process. We need to support new communication channels. We have to be agile our organization for through it has to be agile. And that means application apps, etcetera. And when we look at connected it's same business products have said, customers leads prospects, information sources. So dealing with various sources, social networks, etcetera. And that's one of the things where APIs come into the place. So what is this about when we talk about APIs? So I have some history in developing and, and even my age I'm was familiar with things such as Cobal and assembler and so on.
So I have some, some for cramming history and for me, the API never was a strange term, but clearly for, for a lot of people, API is something they don't know about. And when we look at term, this abbreviation, the application programming interface, that the really important thing was it was in the interface. It's what really helps us to interface, to interface with various apps, with applications, whatever it allows us to programmatically access applications it's basis for system to system communicate communicator APIs are not new. So they are out for, I don't know how long and also APIs that allow us to work across applications are not new. So I remember the days of CORBA, I've gone through web services and a lot of other things. So it's, it's not that this entirely new, I think what, what is really used the, the number of APIs available today, and that's something that we'll talk about later a little.
And the other thing is that they are easier to use them to use than ever before. And maybe searching goes back to the requirements. When I look at this requirement of agility, the requirement of connected business, that means the demand is bigger than ever before. And so when we look at this example here of we have a user, he wants to use an app and when he uses this app. So in fact, not an API between the user, it's more user and sorry for that. The app on the smartphone, this app accesses via APIs, maybe some services of the phone itself services from the take provider, it accesses backend applications, this backend application, which then access my, again, use some APIs to access other backend applications, which then again, use APIs to access databases, for instance, open data. So in fact, all this communication between the various programs I have in it here, apps, applications, whatever, based on some sort of API.
And when we look at this topic, them APIs trust play very important roles from the it per so maybe let's start, start in the middle of this. So we have applications. Applications are exposing APIs. So they are saying, okay, there are some interfaces. Someone can use to access informa access this application to request servers from their application. For instance, request some information from the application. I need to manage these APIs. This is rather develop, comes through blade developer. My for instance, develop mobile tools based on a mobile development environment. He might use an orchestration platform. He might use standard development tools, whatever it he's using, whatever else. So there are various ways to do that, which means, for instance, he might use some big data and add some other smart data using a graph API or something or whatever. He might create business processes. He might create mobile apps, whatever.
And the result again might expose APIs, which means the result, our applications, which again, expose APIs from an it perception. It means we, we, we have to understand how to expose APIs, which APIs to expose, how to secure these APIs. Securing is one part of the managing, managing part. So how can we manage these APIs? How can we deal with this area itself? How can we enable our developers? We need this developers. We need to make it simple, which brings us to the topics of rest and phase etcetera. It's sort of a new level of what we know for many years, the civil staff service oriented architecture, but at a fundamentally new level, far more fine, trained, flexible, fast cetera. And on the other hand, I think this is important thing to understand. It's not just because developers like to use APIs. We don't do it because of the developers.
We do it because there's a business need behind it. There's the need for orchestrating business processes, business process, which span a lot of applications internally external. When we look at the connected enterprise stuff where organizations work together, organizations work with the customer business partners, etcetera, then orchestrating business process becomes increasingly complex. We have more Pega systems to connect. We have to use APIs than one or other way. It's about enriching data, making information smart. I will talk about this on my next slide. It's about enabling collaboration. It's becoming, it's about becoming part of the SIS. There are a lot of scenarios behind it. I will touch some one or two right now. Matt will talk about far more of these scenarios. And what you will see really is here. The entire thing is really not about development mainly. So you need the developers. You need to enable the developers, but sudden amount of question was how does the business benefit from it?
And there are a lot of ways where it has where the API economy has a massive business impact. On the right side, I have a small figure, which is what, what I call the business impact indicator. So looking at various technologies, I look at how can they sort of help in, in standard things such as cost savings and compliance fulfillment, which is more the it view or the classical view and how can they help in business alignment. So doing business better or enabling business, doing new things. And the API staff clearly is one of the, the areas which is, has, its, has the biggest impact regarding business enablement. More than most of the other things we can do in it. It's really about business alignment, business enablement, helping the business to do those things. Business needs to do, to connect and to be agile about ABC stuff, agile business collected.
So it's about one of the examples is sort of from big data to smart information. So when we look at the, the left side of this screen of this figured, and that we have sort this sort of classical big data approach, so we have very resources, we put them together, we manual them through, do some processing. And we hope that result is really about the result is really what we need. In many cases, it's not really about putting all together, all the big data. In many cases, it's about putting together some data, having some results and then adding other types of data. So we might use open government data, for instance, for statistical information or whatever. We might use a graph API to learn more about a person, which we have identified based on our big data processing stuff. Cetera. So it's really about saying we use these APIs to, to extract additional data, to express some specific data here.
And that's really where we end up with smart information. That's really because this APIs stuff enables us to access more information, very flexible way. And here we can really make, for instance, processes around the marketing stuff is that are far more smooth, far more smart than we did before. So this is one of the important things. The other staff, that's sort of a part of it. It's really about expanding your customer data. So you have your website, Interac action, your staff registration, you have your big data, you know, something about, but then you might add the credit report, agency information, information from Facebook, considering that you have some, some connection on Facebook with this person, it's really about enriching data APIs help us to do more in that area. This is just one of the many areas I've touched some other business process management, creating mobile apps, whatever, where these things really come into play.
So the question, I think it's simple to answer why API management, because we need to know our APIs. What are we exposing? When we expose APIs to letters, we have need to have them under control. We need to manage these APIs. We need to secure them and to expose them. And we also need to manage performance and a lot of other stuff. So API management is a huge thing to do, and this is true for a lot of things. So we, and we have to understand that APIs, this is a complex filter. So we have internal and external facing I APIs for instance, which we both have to handle. So some shouldn't be exposed to everyone. We have documented undocumented once maybe we have open and restricted ones, rejected ones, which are really restricted to few users, a few use cases that are, we might have free and paid APIs, etcetera. That's where really API management comes into today to enable the business based on the technical system to system communication based on the APIs. So this is really the story we are talking about right now. I want to hand over to map. We will talk about business cases. So real world examples for customers benefiting from API management of link center and on, so Matt, it's your turn now.
Okay. Thank you very much, Martin. And, and thanks for that good introduction on, on the business of APIs and the API economy. I, I want to talk, you know, compliment what Martin is saying with some case studies and a, and a little bit of a brief segue from, from what Martin was discussing around, you know, really the, the taxonomy of the world of APIs and, and, and linking. I think, I, I think we hear a lot about the consumer consumerization of it these days, but I think that what APIs kind of represent is the techno pathologization of business to a large degree. So let's see here, I'm going. So let me just start by drawing a picture of the open enterprise. And really this is what I think Martin was alluding to companies today are really faced with a lot of opportunities and a lot of disruptions around how, how business is done.
I, I think it's fair to say that in a lot of areas that are enabled by technology, businesses are a little bit confused, but excited about how they can take advantage of new, new channels for their business. So, you know, partners, integration, integration across divisions in a company, this is nothing new. I think that companies have, have been, this has been the primary driver for, for integration, business integration and technology integration historically in the, in the age of computing. But I, I think with the rapid pace of mergers and acquisitions that's taking place, you know, that becomes more and more of an area that companies need to address. And, and it's certainly an area that they're continuing to address with, with integration and through APIs. Mobile is one of the most popular at the moment, disruptive areas where, you know, we took, we went through the big boom around the internet and client server and desktop computing and, and the big capability that came with that companies are now faced with an equal amount of opportunity and disruption with mobile strategy and, and what they can do with mobile devices, whether it's company looking to launch mobile apps for consumers to use, or whether they want to create mobile apps that will give their own employees new ways to conduct business for the company, IOT and big data.
This is the internet of things or the internet of everything. It's really the smart device world. We, we like to look at the IOT world and big data collectively, because what we're seeing is a lot of the explosive amounts of data that are being produced are really a result of this highly connected business world, where you may have smart cars or smart home devices or media communication in home or medical devices. So this is an area now where I think mobile is it it's an extension of mobile, but it's going to go orders of magnitude beyond what mobile did in terms of the production of data. So again, companies are looking to, okay, now that we've connected desktops and we connected mobile devices, how can we connect everything onto our networks in a very open way so that we can collect that data cloud is something that's been out there for a while.
And I think companies are coming outta the hype cycle. And really, you know, as an example with Amazon web services, really looking at how they can move their workloads onto these public cloud based services, how they can leverage things like Salesforce and other software as a service offering to extend their business, to get best of breed services quickly, to reduce, reduce some of their expenses or, or move their expenses to different categories. So there's a lot happening with enterprise computing in the cloud. Developers are fundamental to all of this. So I think Martin said it very well there, you know, APIs are not a tool to go and get developers. APIs are a business enabler that require developers in order to fulfill the business promise of the API channel. So as companies are looking to open up all these different areas of business, they need to ensure that their, that their APIs and services are well known, and that could be well known outside their company in terms of what third party developers might do to find APIs and use them and build new mobile apps that use a company services.
But it also could be inside the enterprise where, you know, when we went through the SOA phase where we had a lot of companies looking to provide reusable services, they may have provided those reusable services, but maybe didn't do as good of a job as they could on getting people to use those reusable services just because they're reusable doesn't mean they'll be used. So there's a lot of, and I'll talk a bit more about how the developers factor into the, to the equation. And finally, also on top of all this companies are looking at social networks and how social networks can have an effect on their business. This is a pretty early stage one as well. I think a lot of companies will say, okay, we're gonna go out and get a Twitter feed, but how can you really take advantage of the captive audience that you've got in social networks and make it resonate for your business, create new revenue opportunities for your business, create new market share opportunities for your business.
So there are lots of stats that back this up to show what companies are doing in, in these areas. So, you know, there are, we're, we're now globally around 79% of companies using software as a service offerings. I imagine that a large percentage of that is Salesforce, but there's certainly SaaS offerings covering a, a broader landscape from talent management to E R P to CRM. And so on social networks, obviously you've got over a billion on Facebook alone now, but when you look at a business network like LinkedIn, there's a lot of potential there. Mobile apps are everywhere. I think I saw that the latest iPhones have already sold. They sold 9 million units over the weekend. Something like that. I mean, I think that mobile is just kind of a special one where people are so personally tied to their devices, that it really represents a new business opportunity for companies looking for new consumers, as well as, as, as I mentioned before, if you're a company and you, you can offer a, a mobile app to do your own internal business, you'll just get much greater uptake if client, or if your employees are able to use it on their favorite smartphone, all the connected devices, it says 50 billion.
That's, you know, so some factor of multiplication more than there are people on earth, seven times, as many people as we have on the planet, that's gonna continue to grow and grow exponentially and just the gobs and gobs of data that we've got out there. So this is a real, this is the reality of computing in 2013, but in order to be a company that is able to take advantage of that, you have to make sure that you can open up your channels of business. And APIs are the common thread that go across integrating partners through open web communication, mobile apps. Whenever you use your mobile apps, they're using APIs to connect into the backend services that provide the data and provide the business processes. IOT is, you know, has to connect into the enterprise systems. Really connecting machine to machine is, is, is one thing.
And, and it, but it doesn't add a lot of value connecting those smart devices into large enterprise systems that can crunch the analytics and provide meaningful data and real time decision making. That's where the value is. And so that again is facilitated by APIs. Cloud services are exposed. They, they expose their business services through APIs, and at the same time, they also expose their provisioning services through API. So we have a case study that we'll talk about that social networks. You know, when you go to a, a webpage and you like something on Facebook or tweet something, you're actually accessing Twitter API, or the Facebook API, and then developers really, this is their, this is the bridge to the developer community. If developers need to write application to use these services, they're gonna need to use those APIs. They're gonna need to understand the APIs and they're gonna need to gain access to the APIs.
So, you know, just one more brief note on some real examples. I mean, it's one thing to talk about all the landscape, but if we look at really concrete examples, we have three companies on this slide, Google, Amazon, and Salesforce that didn't exist 15 years ago. And now they're some of the biggest leaders in global business. I think Google's brand recognition is now somewhere equivalent to Coca-Cola. Amazon is, you know, is spreading globally. Certainly north America, massive brand and salesforce.com is, is really created this SaaS market, or at least made it prove its viability, all of them. They didn't exist. How did they grow so rapidly? How did they get to the scale where, you know, banks and, and other, you know, public sector organizations and telecommunications providers that are used to being the biggest gorilla in, in computing now look at these companies with envy because of the, their ability to introduce new business capabilities so rapidly while they did it by having a very open architecture, open systems, which heavily utilized APIs, Google has a number of different cases using APIs, whether it's in the Android operating system for mobile, you know, they have a lot of intellectual capital around APIs.
Google maps is API enabled service. So, you know, giant and innovator around APIs. Salesforce certainly allows all their integration with enterprise systems through APIs and, and Amazon made a, made a mandate. Jeff Bezos made a mandate in 2002 that everything must be exposed through APIs. And essentially said, if you don't do this, you're fired. So this, this was he, his vision was to create Amazon as a platform of the systems as a platform so that they could be plugable and used across all business units. And that is what created the foundation for what became Amazon web services, the most popular cloud computing platform in existence. So building your enterprise as a platform, creating an open enterprise, this is how you can take advantage of, of all these new capabilities that are out there in order to do that, though, there are a common set of needs that need to be addressed.
So you have to make sure that access it's easy to access services, but at the same time, you have to make sure that that access is guarded and secure. And then identity is confirmed. You want to be able to provide both operational visibility into how well those APIs or, and, and those open business services are functioning at the same time. You need to provide business visibility so that you can understand who is using the services. How much are they being used? Are you hitting the actual targets that you have for your business, whether that's number of new subscribers or whether it's actual revenue generating traffic in order to make sure developers can easily use the APIs. You need to have documentation. You need to make sure that you're, you're able to leverage your existing services. You don't wanna have to recreate everything you've already built before in order to expose APIs.
So you wanna be adaptable. You wanna make sure you're scalable so that you can grow in accordance with the needs of your business. And you wanna make sure that things are extensible so that if you offer APIs that work for partner integration, those APIs can also work for mobile. Also can work for smart device connectivity and so on. So this, this is the collection of needs that really are provides a foundation for API management. So when we talk about API management, it's not like we're focused in on one functional area here. We're really looking across the board. And so, you know, we at layer seven have been working in this space for pretty much all of our existence. We've been around for more than 10 years. We're recently acquired by CA technologies because this is such a high growth business, you know, area of computing in general.
And, and really our focus is around API management, which brings all of these pieces together and gives companies an API platform so that they can take advantage of their existing assets and, and make sure that they can go out with the right level of openness, security and understandability. So I, you know, we like to look at things from a very human perspective around, and I think this is an area where, where API management is significantly different than SOA and other kind of architectural paradigms that have come before, as opposed to going out and forcing everyone to do what you think is the right thing. API management and the API landscape really is very organic. So it's, even though it's all about automation and exposing interfaces from programs, the way it's conducted is really about people and their different roles. So what do the partners need?
What do the developers need? You know, if you're, if you're the mobile business owner, what are you looking for? How can you, you know, who the enterprise architect who's focused on cloud? You know, how are, how can you make things easy, big data access for the actual developers who need to crunch numbers and, and these things all come together. I, I, I have a slide here that talks about the API life cycle. So as opposed to looking at a diagram that shows all the different connected systems, I think it's interesting to follow along the connected people. So you might have a developer who goes into the developer Porwal for this OE Inc open enterprise incorporated, and wants to, to see what services available so they can write a new social business app. You know, that starts the chain. Then the there's an API owner who owns that API says, Hey, we have a new app that just registered on our developer Porwal looks good.
The API developer can look into the Porwal and say, oh, yep. Okay. That new third party developer is using the latest version of the API that was just published. You gotta security architect to monitors the actual testing to ensure that the developer is registered and, and, and uses their credentials appropriately operations. You know, they're, they're launching monitoring the launch into production saying, okay, everything's ready. Then you get back to an actual user out there who downloads the new social business app, loves it, tweets it. And, and of course the final piece is the malicious hacker out there is trying to hack into the system, but can't get in because they're, they're closed off appropriately. So this is a, this is a perspective we like to take when we're looking at, at API management, thinking about the people that are involved. And that really helps because although we're automating things at the end of the day, who the party that brings all the business or the individuals out there who are building services and using the services, let's talk about a few case studies.
Now, first of all, here, here's a very concrete example of API management, probably in the, in the, in the, what we'll call the open API sense. So we were working with a large media company who wanted to be able to provide their premium content to the, to the captive audience. So I talked about this earlier, Xbox 360, my son just got one and he's very excited is a gaming platform and really an entertainment platform that allows individuals, you know, to, to play games, surf the web, get media content downloadable. So this company wanted to make sure they were exploiting that channel. So what they did is they, they used our API platform, including our Porwal, our oof toolkit and our gateway to expose APIs out there to the third party development community so that they could launch new services in this Xbox marketplace. They're able to brand it, them their own.
They're able to own the relationship with the end users. And they're able to very importantly, utilize their existing identity management systems and content providing systems to, we were able to adapt using our gateway technology and provide the APIs out to the outside world. So what this allowed them to do is rather than having to work individually with these developers, that would be writing apps and create partnerships that way, they were able to expose an API with very easy self-service functions so that developers could go into this. Porwal read about the API, write applications, click on a end user license agreement that was very straightforward and just kind of launch things at their own pace. So, you know, this is in progress. This is a very important channel for the company's business and, and just represents a very open exposure of APIs.
Now, similarly, we worked with orange in, you know, France, telecom, orange. They they're, they wanted to expose their kind of traditional telco services, such as IVR and speech to text SMS. And, and, you know, they had a pretty consistent business around how they integrate that with their partners in their established markets within Europe. Primarily what they were looking at though, is as they approached growth markets and wanted to expand into new territories, they wanted to see, you know, test the waters to a degree. So rather than going in and saying, you know, this is our plan, and we're gonna invest a whole lot of money into specific partnerships. They wanted to see what if we just threw our services out there and allowed people to join at their own pace. It would be low investment for us, but it would allow us to, to really get a sense for, for the market and probably identify who the right partners might be. So they offered these APIs through our, our API management platform, and really it became kind of an innovative business development channel where they could offer what they call their orange nursery, which is their, you know, just development type APIs, allow users in the growth markets to experiment with these APIs, write apps, and then identify them and, and move towards partnerships in the future. So again, something that really is a new business enabler for them, because they're able to get people using their real services much more quickly than with a much smaller investment time.
I talked about those are both kind of open cases, but we talked earlier about the importance of internal cases. So we worked with one of the world's largest banks on their investment side. And what happens with, with their business is their, their trading services. They've got to have regularity between how traffic is managed to their, to their backend trading services. You know, in the, in the world of investment banking, losing a second's worth of data can have major financial implications. So what they've done is they've got a number of trading service clients internal, and they expose the APIs consistently for their backend training services through our API management platform. They use us for a typical case where we're doing identity management to ensure we authenticate clients, but also by identifying clients, we're also able to identify who are the most high value clients. So combining the identity information, the scalability required to handle high volume trading and combining our knowledge of the actual service availability on the back end, we've delivered a API management solution for this client, which solves a very strong business need for them, ensuring that the highest value traffic that's going through their trading hub is serviced with the highest priority.
This is, you know, this area of service level management around APIs is something that isn't talked about as much, but it's another very high, has a lot of business value for clients in, in financial services and other industries as well.
Another case of the, the open API, but maybe with a little bit of a different focus, we have a client is a us based airline. And, and actually the travel industry is an industry where there has been a lot of openness for a long time, shared ticketing services, brokering of travel trips and, and com combining hotels and flights and cars and so on. So it's actually an industry where there's a lot of integration happening between these different parties. Now, this company wanted to launch a mobile app and what happened is they, they initially said, well, we've got all the backend data services. Why don't we just take that and turn it into an app? And unfortunately there wasn't a lot of focus on user design. You know, they were very data focused and very focused on their existing business processes. This did not fly well, pardon the punt with the, their customers.
And so they kind of went back to the drawing board and said, you know what? We were actually offering kind of API as an app. What we need to do is offer our API and then allow a capable mobile development consultant and group of consultants to build the app for us. So they implemented our API management platform to expose the, the data in a very mobile friendly way, and then allow these third party developers to build the apps that use the data. The result was their, their app that had been poorly rated. The new, the new app got much better rating, much better market reach and hit their business goals of trying to really connect with a, a new captive audience of mobile users.
Two more case studies just quickly. I, I mentioned this earlier cloud service providers, you know, there, there is a lot that we can do with helping companies expose their services to the cloud or connect into cloud-based services. In the case of S which is a large telco provider or internet service provider in the us, they have a, they actually offer a public set of public cloud services in order to provision those services. There's a lot of complicated functionality that has to go into their VMware infrastructure, their storage, other third party systems. So, you know, rather than expose that as a set of APIs, the fragmented APIs that might have different protocols and different standards. And so on, they're using the layer seven API management platform to provide consistency, to provide access control and to provide visibility into, you know, all the users that are coming in and, and leveraging their public cloud services. So this is the way that, that really, when you look at, even though it's a very technical use case to provide public cloud services, usability is extremely important. You have to be appealing to the people out there that are, are building the cloud services.
And on the final use case, we have a large global software provider that's in one of our, one of our largest clients. They actually have established the layers of an API platform as their internal business service hub. So, you know, you could think of it as a, as ANB gateway where all their reusable services internally, whether it's, you know, billing financial related or CRM related all going through this, this hub, what happened is they were an early adopter of the SAP Hannah in memory database system. And they were using it early on to house all their CRM data, you know, but having that data resident in memory and, you know, very high performance, they still needed a way to get people to use the data. And in order to do that, they said, you know what, let's, let's use the, the API platform that we have in place internally to expose that.
So we worked with them and quickly were able to offer out their CRM data through a collection of rest APIs that allowed those, you know, all these internal users who, who might find, find this data useful, they could get it quickly. What I think is very interesting about this solution, and I think this is a real business need. There's a lot of privacy rules around data, and this is particularly important when it comes to things like power consumption, data stuff, that's coming from smart device networks. What they're doing here is they're actually able to query the data, but apply the user's identity to make sure that the right person is getting the right data. If it's a power user, they might get a full set of data. If it's somebody who is in a, in a different department, they might get a summary view of the data or a filtered set of data.
So this is the type of power where, you know, in the business context where we're dealing with lots of complexity around data ownership, it's, this is something that will become more and more important. Exposing the APIs will mean understanding the identity and ensuring that you're not leaking any data because we're in a world of extreme sensitivity around, around data ownership and privacy. So as you can see from, from all those case studies APIs are a fundamental piece in a number of different business contexts. They're particularly important for innovative cases around opening up the enterprise. And there are a consistent set of areas that need to be addressed in order to make your business or your client's business, a successful open enterprise. So with that, I'd like to turn it back and probably go to question and answer,
Thank you, Matt, for this information, you, you made very clear why we really need APIs, why we need API management. In fact, because it's really about supporting city called it ization of business, it's sort of the underlying foundation you need to, to really support open or connected enterprise and the agility business needs to deal. And so we are right now in the Q a session I'd like to ask the participants to enter questions if they have any. So, so one of the questions I have here is Matt. Maybe you can go a little bit more into detail regarding the security aspect of managing API. So discussion came in a little bit before you've, you've touched your last slide where you talked about the second last slide, where you talked about the security stuff. Maybe you can stress this topic a little more.
Sure. So I think in the, you know, there's a lot of, a lot of places that go on security and APIs. I think maybe the most tangible context for APIs is always around mobile because it's, so it's such a, a personal use case for everybody. But really, I think what what's interesting to me about APIs is it's not a case of here's an established integration pattern, and now we need to apply security to it because so much of the value of APIs is opening things up and exposing things out to these different business channels. It really becomes an optimization exercise between how open and how secure you wanna be. So what we're seeing trend wise is, you know, companies will probably start just being sensitive around what type of data that they expose through the APIs. So if it's a bank they're not gonna immediately go out and expose financial transactions through an API channel, cause they know that they're sensitivity around that.
You know, they're not gonna, if it, if it's other companies they're not just gonna go and expose a core customer data. So, but I think a lot of the, a lot of the interesting area around APIs is, is what I had just described there around applying different views. We call this, we have a solution around this, we call it data lens. So what we, you know, if you, maybe it's a bit more of a technical view, but APIs are typically rest based calls that, that have URLs associated with them. So you can go in query data. I think that, you know, you wanna make it as simple as possible, so you don't wanna have to have, I don't know, everybody connecting to a thousand different URLs for the same data set, but I think, you know, through, through protocols, through capturing identity credentials, we wanna make sure that we're able to apply the right lens to that data depending on who's requesting it. And so, you know, we, the, I think that there's a lot of complexity that will be coming with the internet of things world and think about it in most cases today, an API request is initiated by a person, but in the future, there's gonna be a lot of unattended automated devices that will be calling APIs to, to hold data and calling APIs to push data.
Yeah. And there will be a lot of trained interactions with a lot of applications in between all this.
Yeah. So, so I think that, you know, the, I think it's very important as companies look to expose their enterprise through this open channel. I need to think about who is, who is the end user, if there is one and especially about, you know, ownership of the data and you know, how much data needs to be exposed in order to fulfill the business goals. But I, I think this is a really interesting area about how we, how we deal with identity in the context of this exposure of, of big data. And, and I, I, I think we certainly have some interesting solutions in this big,
Okay. Another question is this embarrassingly about rest and chasing, or also about other types of APIs?
I think, I think you, you hit on this earlier as well, which is it's, it's not at all about the protocols. I think that there's been, you know, and I, I, I see often technologists debating, especially SOA versus the API world. Well, what is the difference and so on. And they start talking about standards and protocols and so on. And I did mention the protocols because there just is a, a practical, you know, practically speaking. It just so happens that rest and Jason and OA, or the prevailing protocols in this world, however, it's not about the protocols at all, all protocols are, are an enabler. Fundamentally. I think that the, to me, the biggest shift into this API world is what I mentioned before, which is this the humanity aspect. The fact that I think a lot of the reason that there was companies had trouble getting SOA, not, not, they never had trouble rolling out the technology.
It was always about getting the ultimate business goals, which is reusable services, reducing cost, you know, opening up new channels. The business goals actually remain the same, but the approach is quite different. I think the fact that we're saying, you know, what, in order to scale, we, we need to make sure that the users of the, of the APIs have all of the information they need at their fingertips in order to make sure that the, we hit the business goals. It, it's not that we need to go and create a taxonomy for every single component of our data model. We actually just need to get out there with the high volume APIs that are most interest to the world. So I think that something more of a pragmatic humanistic approach is what, what really makes the difference for the API world. And I think we have a great model to follow, which is the, the open web. So as much as we follow the technologies of the open web, like rest, I think we, we follow the way that the, the web is scaled. And I think that's why, you know, I worked at a bank for 11 years and I just find it phenomenal how available these web based services like Facebook and Google are, as you know, you don't, you never see Facebook put up a maintenance window or Google put up a maintenance window. Right. It's just because they're architected in this way. So I think it's, I think it's really interesting.
Okay, Matt, thank you very much. And thank you. Tilt handy. So call webinar, we have a lot of auto webinars coming up in the next few weeks, so I hope to have you back as an attend the next two weeks again, have a look at our upcoming events. And again, thank you to all the attends and person to thank you to UMMA for participating in this copy called webinar a nice evening, your nice day, depending on the time. So on your end, but.