The Gravity of Digital Platform In API Economy
Digital Platform to serve an ecosystem has tendency to be associated only in a monolithic single-vendor production. With modern tools the Digital Platform can be also a result of multivendor co-creation using their best products available in the Internet to form a platform. All such vendors benefit from API Economy, while the ecosystem using the platform benefit from silo-free technologies and vendor lock-free systems.
Digital Platform
The smallest independent publicly available piece of software providing services to other software is a productized API. Such API product is located in the Internet and available 24/7 to add high quality value to many connected client software. Their client software don’t have to bother with implementing the same-same again and again, but just enjoy the ride.
“The platform may be entirely data-less”
APIs help the clients to focus on solving their unique problem very fast. The client software may be any kind of data processing system, such as but not limited to application, dashboard, or another API. Interconnected APIs form digital value chains and networks together over the Internet to process data in various ways (more about difference between Data and API). This modern way of building Digital Platforms is based on API Economy, where value creation is monetizeable.
Business Ecosystem
Societies and industries collect people together to collaborate as an ecosystem around their businesses. Digital services smoothify their collaboration and automate some parts of the processes to gain efficiency and free people more time from manual work load to let them focus on the most productive tasks as human beings.
Business Ecosystems have different needs. Instead of trying to create one size fits all type of a solution, each of the ecosystems may have their own kind of Digital Platform. The platforms may be quite different. This is possible without creating yet another set of silos, because each of these platform are a collection of different sets, but the same API products which are used by other platforms too.
“API Management creates the holding force, the gravity, to keep APIs together”
Platform may be entirely data-less to make just transformation to the source data used in a Business Ecosystem. Platform can be naturally also data-full to optimize some of the frequent data transformations. In technical terms we are talking about stateless and stateful Digital Platforms. The stateless Digital Platform resembles quite much the principles of functional programming or REST API.
Layered Ecosystems
The Digital Platform is formed around a API Management which makes it easy to collect suitable APIs from the Internet as one collection. The API (Product-) Owners are suggested to bring their APIs in the Digital Platform. In such situation, the Business Ecosystem might require further development in API to serve a different purpose. This is a question for API Owner on how organize the functional change either in the API itself or add another, ecosystem specific API in front of the actual API, for example. Or some other API Owner may bring a new API in front.
As Digital Platform is created by Digital Ecosystem around API Management, the Business Ecosystem is formed around the Digital Platform. The users set the demand and the platform supply the services. The platform is open for everyone to bring better and better APIs to serve the Business Ecosystem. Open competition ensures the best ones are becoming the most successful APIs.
API Management creates the holding force, the gravity, to keep APIs together in multi-vendor enable Digital Ecosystem to develop a desired Digital Platform evolution for Business Ecosystem.
The writer is an Apitalist of APInf Oy, helping organizations to participate in API Economy, as well as helping API and Application developers come together around API Management platforms to form ecosystems and standardize APIs of the World.
