Ian Vanstone
VP Market Insights/Futures
Introduction
In the ever-evolving digital landscape, leaders must constantly navigate between established practices and emerging innovations. One such pivotal decision point is the balance between reliance on Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and the adoption of real-time event streaming. While APIs have been the cornerstone of digital interactions, there’s a growing realisation that an over-dependence on them may be hindering businesses from harnessing the full potential of real-time data processing and insights offered by event streaming technologies.
This two-part article makes the link between API addiction and a lack of event streaming adoption. It provides tips on treating API addiction and opening new real-time business growth opportunities.
The API Era
APIs have been instrumental in the digital transformation journey of many businesses. They allow disparate systems to communicate, sharing data and functionalities efficiently.
The benefits are substantial: APIs enable significant improvements in customer experience and operational efficiency, facilitate modularity in system design, enable third-party integrations, and support a scalable architecture for growing digital ecosystems.
The astronomic growth in API usage is a testament to their value, with APIs forming the backbone of all modern software applications.
API Era Consequences and API Addiction
Despite the range of benefits that APIs continue to deliver, the widespread adoption of APIs has led to unintended consequences.
The first consequence of note is that businesses have amassed hordes of developers equipped with basic API skills. A significant volume of these developers are primarily focused on other technologies and do not have the deep API skills needed to drive maximum business benefits, ensure security and compliance, and drive automation efficiencies. Yes, such developers can code basic APIs, but without expert guidance, they are prone to pitfalls that result in business and technology risks.
The second consequence is that larger businesses have built up multiple API tools and platforms that overlap in feature and function. Without deep expertise in API market offerings and integration architecture, an ineffective set of API platforms can live on for years in poor health and at increasing cost. And every new API developed by poorly enabled developers makes the platform sprawl mess harder to clean up.
So, we commonly find businesses with large numbers of developers, (with only basic API skills), surrounded by a mess of API platforms. The organisational inertia of this situation results in a culture of ‘API addiction’ – where there is a narrow focus on APIs, and teams struggle to adopt innovation.
Event Streaming: The Untapped Potential
In contrast to the request-response model of APIs, event streaming is about continuously processing and reacting to real-time data. It involves capturing data in real-time from various sources, processing it as it arrives, and using it to enable immediate decision-making and actions. This approach offers numerous benefits, such as improved responsiveness, a better understanding of customer behaviour through real-time analytics, and an improved ability to benefit from artificial intelligence technologies. Fundamentally, event streaming is enabling a range of new business growth opportunities.
Lack of Event Streaming Adoption
Despite these advantages, event streaming remains underutilised in many businesses. This hesitance is often linked to the comfort and familiarity with API-centric architectures. A lack of awareness about event streaming benefits, a lack of expertise, and the perceived complexity of implementing such systems contribute to this reluctance.
Coming in Part 2
In Part 2, we will discuss how API addiction inhibits event streaming adoption, and we’ll provide recommendations to overcome the addiction and enable new business growth opportunities.
IntegrationWorks
IntegrationWorks has deep expertise in APIs and event stream technology. Our core business is helping your business achieve maximum value from both.
If you want to drive towards real-time business benefits by leveraging event streaming improvements, contact us for an introductory session to understand what’s possible for your business.
We can also help if your developers need a little API expert guidance, or you need to clean up that API platform sprawl before the mess gets worse.
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