Value Creators — Transportation

We know that it costs something to move an item from A to B. In the physical world we pay for travel tickets to move ourselves and we pay for delivery charges to pay for goods to be shipped to us. As the distance, weight of goods or class of travel increases — so does the price. In the same way, customers also value transportation and or course in the software world, we are talking about the movement of data.

Just like in the case of storage, transporting data from A to B is sometimes not as simple as it first appears. Common challenges can include:

1. Authentication — The sender has to be confident that the receiver is authentic and vice versa. Mechanisms should be in place to sure that a bad actor is not impersonating either the sender or receiver.
2. Integrity — The information needs to reach the recipient in exactly the same state that it left the sender. Mechanisms such as checksums should be in place to ensure that the recipient can be confident that no information has been lost. Security controls should be implemented to ensure that the data has not been tampered with in any way.
3. Large Data Transfers — Special provisions should be made when file sizes are large. Sufficient high-speed bandwidth connections are required and features such as the ability to resume a transfer should be provided. It may be necessary to break large transfers into smaller chunks in which case the ability to reliably re-assemble the constituent parts is necessary. For global deployments, the ability to host large data files in multiple locations can be useful.
4. High Volume Use Cases — This relates to ensuring that data can be provided to hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands users or user agents concurrently. This is particularly important for transactional sites whose users require services on a synchronous basis. Mechanisms should be in place to prevent a single user agent hogging resources to the detriment of all other users.
5. Resilience and Redundancy — When the data absolutely must be available 24/7, then resilience and redundancy considerations become important. The ability to provide endpoints across multiple locations which potentially use replicated data storage components.

Solving all of these challenges is essential for Enterprise business-critical APIs. Customers will value solutions that can demonstrate and evidence this performance, security and reliability.

The value of an API is only realised is companies invest the time and effort to integrate them properly to their other products and solutions. The more systems and processes that make use of your APIs, the more value the customer can derive from your solution. There are a number of areas that can help your customers adopt and keep using your integration solutions.

1. Documentation and Tutorials — A well-written up to date reference documentation site is essential. The documentation should include several examples implemented using different programming languages and ideally quick-start tutorials. Some documentation can be auto-generated, but this should be complemented with expert guidance from people who have actually built applications using the API.
2. Developer Portal — A dedicated website that hosts all documentation, authentication keys, SDKs and tools. Ideally, there should also be a sandbox environment where new applications can be fully tested without influencing data stored within the live environment.
3. Community Engagement — Build a community of developers and provide question and answer forums so they can support each other with common use cases, frequently asked questions and share code snippets. Complement online activities with off-line events and webinars.
4. Certification Programme — Create more formalised educational programs and offer your own certification programs. Giving developers something to show for their efforts that is portable across your industry will increase engagement and build credibility for your development environment and options.
5. Hackathons and Competitions — Host competitions with prizes and other awards for developers to solve complex problems and to encourage them to evangelise about your solution.
6. Case Studies — Build detailed technical case studies of how your API is being used today by your customers. Potentially offer discounts to customers and developers who are willing to participate in marketing and promotional events.
7. Support and Feedback — Provide specialist responsive support to developers, particularly in the early stages of adoption. Gather and incorporate feedback to ensure that the APIs are constantly improving and are increasingly easier to adopt.
8. Partnerships — Provide out of the box connectors for integration products such as Zapier and for partnerships with other vendors that are within the same ecosystem. Form a community with other vendor API development teams.

An effective, easy to use, secure, performant and wide functioning API is an essential component of most Enterprise B2B SaaS products. Ideally, the API strategy should form part of the initial Enterprise architecture discussions. Appoint a dedicated product leader for integration and API work and constantly work hard to make your APIs easy to understand, adopt and deliver value.