Table of Contents
- Summary
- API Management Primer
- Report Methodology
- Decision Criteria Analysis
- Evaluation Metrics
- Key Criteria: Impact Analysis
- Analyst’s Take
- Methodology
- About Ben Stanford
- About GigaOm
- Copyright
1. Summary
Organizations are implementing strategies to connect their data stores, applications, and microservices via application programming interfaces (APIs). This interconnectivity can lead to issues with sprawl unless the APIs are properly managed.
API management is the process of making APIs available to users while controlling access and monitoring how they are performing across the applications and environments they connect. This allows organizations to respond to rapid changes in customer demands, address urgent business needs, protect themselves against attack, and continuously improve their stack through modularization.
API management tools help organizations publish APIs to internal developers and external partners and allow organizations to list, control, monitor, and scale their APIs. The solutions help businesses enhance the developer experience by offering customizable portals, which support users looking to understand the API offerings and engage with their community of developers. Enhanced insights into API activity, load balancing, and connectivity with newer technologies like service-mesh can drive business value by optimizing communication across the stack.
APIs drive agility to optimize customer experiences, create dynamic digital ecosystems, achieve operational excellence, and build platform business models. API management tools can reduce development time and increase API reuse. And they help with maintaining API service level agreements (SLAs), which organizations increasingly need to protect themselves against reputational risk through downtime, failure to safeguard sensitive data, or DDoS attacks.
How to Read this Report
This GigaOm report is one of a series of documents that helps IT organizations assess competing solutions in the context of well-defined features and criteria. For a fuller understanding, consider reviewing the following reports:
Key Criteria report: A detailed market sector analysis that assesses the impact that key product features and criteria have on top-line solution characteristics—such as scalability, performance, and TCO—that drive purchase decisions.
GigaOm Radar report: A forward-looking analysis that plots the relative value and progression of vendor solutions along multiple axes based on strategy and execution. The Radar report includes a breakdown of each vendor’s offering in the sector.
Solution Profile: An in-depth vendor analysis that builds on the framework developed in the Key Criteria and Radar reports to assess a company’s engagement within a technology sector. This analysis includes forward-looking guidance around both strategy and product.