2. www.soa.com/atmosphere
Today’s Audience
• You work for a company and are wondering how to leverage APIs
– How do you create a compelling case for your business?
– How do you go about building an API?
– How do you release it into the wild?
• You are an App Developer
– What does the API do for me?
– Can I trust this API?
• You are one of our competitors
– They are serving beer in the lobby
3. www.soa.com/atmosphere
A Case Study – SOA Software
• SOA Software built its first product in 2002
• Thriving software product business
– Direct Sales to Enterprise
– On premise
• Profitable
6. www.soa.com/atmosphere
Emerging Market Landscape
• (Cloud) Integration Brokers/Brokerages – these are the
middle-men, like SOA Software, that are offering value-added
services for hard-earned cash
• API Providers – these are businesses that expose APIs
• App Developers – these are internal groups, partners and
developers
• Typical patterns that we are seeing:
– B2E – business to employee. More and more businesses are
leveraging mobile devices (personal or not) in the workplace
– B2B – the traditional partner integration space with an emphasis
on mobile, devices
– B2D – business to developer. This is a pattern that exploits a
long term consumer-facing strategy
7. www.soa.com/atmosphere
Challenges
• Motivating the business
– Threats do not always translate well to opportunities
• Channel Development
– Funding
– Sales
– Support
– Profit
• Leveraging existing technology
– Temptation is to throw everything out and start again
– Don’t forget that while technology changes, the problems
largely stay the same
– New requirements: SaaS, Multi-tenancy, UI, Security,
Market and Competitive needs, etc.
8. www.soa.com/atmosphere
Our Approach
• We have a good, scalable, proven SOA runtime technology that
is capable of REST, Mobile, etc.
– An on-premise software product is tough to build and support
– We wanted to leverage this as much as possible. This has years of
QA and works like a charm
• Our management server is targeted for internal use, behind the
firewall by operations and IT.
– We decided to create a new server that leveraged the latest
technologies and met the requirements of SaaS, multi-tenancy and
federation. It is impossible to retrofit these capabilities and we
needed a whole new product.
9. www.soa.com/atmosphere
Our Approach
• We set about designing the API as a
product itself: the ‘Atmosphere Platform
API’
• Since we were building an API
Management platform anyway we could be
our own customer to prove out the
technology
• As an example, we needed the following
API Management Requirements ourselves:
– App and API Discovery – we are an App, we
had an API
– Community Management
– Debugging, Testing, Monitoring
– Security
– Policy Management
– Document Management
11. www.soa.com/atmosphere
A new product for a new channel
• Has both enterprise maturity and the feel of a new product
• Is targeted to a new audience
• Supports multiple channels
• The API allows the product to be deployed as SaaS, on-premise,
and hybrid
• Enables new business models, including federations
12. www.soa.com/atmosphere
Summary
• Start with a compelling business strategy
– New channels
– New markets
– New models
– Risks and Threats
• Treat your API as a product
– Extend your brand
– Put yourself in the developer’s shoes, think about how they can
make money
• Leverage your API as a platform
– Provides both stickiness and scaling strategy
– Provides technical longevity - as soon as you launch a product, it is
out of date. An API has a longer life.
