Venturing to the API Economy

Connecting with Digital Business

Connecting business digitally has never been so easy. With the development of software technologies, integrating diverse aspects of your business has become a cakewalk. The Service Oriented Architecture (SoA) concept has been the fore runner of connecting digital business worldwide. According to the SoA standard a service has to comply with four fundamental properties 

• It logically represents a business activity with a specified outcome.
• It is self-contained.
• It is a black box for its consumers.
• It may consist of other underlying services.

In a simpler note it suggests that each service should be modularized and that each service should expose an interface for connecting with other similar services. This is where the application programming interfaces (APIs) come to play.

The API economy

APIs do exactly what their name suggests: It provides an interface for developers to program their applications. People who had their first steps in programming with JAVA would be familiar with the term APIs. In that case JAVA APIs provide an interface for applications to communicate with underlying operations abstracted by the JVM. eg: in Android the camera API provides the operations available on the camera (such as take a picture, adjust exposure) as an interface for applications to control the camera. 

Scale up this scenario to a distributed system, you get the APIs that we are going to discuss here. In this case services expose their capabilities/operations as interfaces so that applications can access and consume them. The exact implementation can differ case by case but generally the communication happens over HTTP/S and may utilize a higher layer protocol like SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) to formalize the request & response formats. This in contrast to the APIs provided by programming languages such as JAVA where they are more internal part of the Object Oriented Programming paradigm. 

When there is an exchange of value an economic transaction will ensue. When connecting services with applications this becomes the case and monetization of the services given via APIs has now become big business. With Inzpire our objective is to add value to your application via our available services to enable you.

APIs at Inzpire Store

Inzpire digital services store is the one stop shop for all your digital service needs. The API products available here will add value to your product or service in many ways. The telco APIs provided by Mobitel will enable you to engage with the customer more closely and will open new avenues for you to generate more revenue. Other APIs you can expect to be available are IoT APIs where you can control IoT devices with simple API calls without going through the tedious configurations and firmware development associated with traditional IoT services. You can also expect to see advanced APIs in a cognitive computing flavor to do image processing, machine learning and natural language processing.

We will discuss how to consume Mobitel's API services in the next blog post.