API powered business innovation

[Music] hello everyone you are listening to the value of apis in innovation hopefully everyone's in the right place and everyone's having a great day my name is chris hood i am with the global customer success team for apogee which is part of google cloud and before we dive into today's topic on innovation i wanted to give everyone the opportunity to jot down my email address if you have questions or if you would like to discuss apogee in more detail want to talk about your api program please just send me a message we are going to have a little time at the end to ask questions and for those who i don't get to then again here's a great way that we can follow up and talk more about innovation and apis and all things that we like to talk about so while i was thinking about today's topic i couldn't help but think about the opportunities in front of each of us and i'm sure most of you who are listening and probably one of the reasons why you're here is because of an opportunity that you have to create transform or even grow your business and hopefully after this you'll be excited to go off and develop incredible new digital journeys and innovate new ideas for your customers innovation is a great topic it is often seen as a driver for competitiveness or as a differentiator across your products processes and people and this is even more true in an era of intense competition and continuous change where the longevity of our products have been decreasing and automation has become essential and more importantly customers have higher demands but how do we keep up how do we innovate in a way that is adaptive continuous and meaningful one thing i share with customers when discussing innovation is this believing you know what your customers want more than they do will cost you those customers and here are some stats that demonstrate this today customers are more curious customers visit new brands research read reviews and price match multiple times before making a purchase in fact 49 of digital consumers research a brand or product two to four times before converting customers are also more impatient than ever before at google we found that 51 percent of digital consumers don't believe companies meet their expectations and 53 percent of visits are abandoned if the mobile experience takes longer than three seconds to load but the real eye opener is what consumers will do after poor experiences 92 percent of digital consumers say they would stop purchasing from a company after three or fewer poor experiences and customers are also more demanding today and here's the important stat digital consumers are looking for companies that are innovative 56 of digital consumers actively seek to buy from the most innovative companies the companies that align with their own technical profile or their digital persona and enterprises that try to impress them with personalized experiences today 66 percent of digital consumers say it takes more to impress them than ever before and 65 percent expect personalized experiences if we return to my quote just a moment ago believing you know what your customers want more than they do here's the stat you must remember 76 percent of consumers expect companies to know their needs before asking them but how do we accomplish this how do we innovate at speed and scale to meet the demands of customers in 2019 that's today folks apis are everywhere mobile phones when you checked your email weather reports ordering an uber even when you turned on today's webcast you were using an api more importantly apis are powering innovation companies using apis as a differentiator and a competitive advantage are winning take a look at something like uber eats or post mates we have one application that uses restaurant and menu apis driver and delivery apis payment apis all in one seamless experience from an enterprise point of view apis are essential for creating innovative business models and innovative modes of engagement with customers apis have helped many businesses meet customers increasing expectations for connected experiences but they've also helped some enterprises pursue even bigger or more profound business evolutions things such as unlocking new revenue streams and product categories creating online marketplaces executing platform business models and even many of the other things you'll find in those much loftier definitions of digital transformation over the years we've seen this evolution happen api started as a way to improve access rest as an alternative to soap http verbs with much simpler architectures we moved into an integration model systems or software a connected to system or software b sending and receiving data between cloud systems and today many businesses are still in this mindset as enterprises have become more mature they reach an experienced view of apis mobile apps powered by apis that deliver experiences to their customers like mobile check deposits for your bank or a loyalty rewards and payment system for your favorite coffee orders but the enterprises that truly unlock the power of apis reach this transformational level digital transformation of the enterprise itself innovation new revenue models improved partnerships and increased modes of engagement from a long-standing integration technology to being a powerful agent of transformation the evolution of apis has been impressive and exciting today apis are the fundamental building blocks for successful businesses yes apis and for those of you who don't know what an api is application programming interfaces application programming interfaces are helping companies create the differentiators for their products processes and people apis are helping companies innovate every day to build new connected experiences become more agile for customers and open up new business markets to collaborate with partners and monetize their digital assets apis are super powerful but you know what the more i actually think about it i personally don't agree with this definition of apis anymore application programming interface it sounds you know way too technical and honestly it doesn't capture the essence of meaningful and continuous innovation that we are talking about today maybe it's time for us to actually innovate the api if we are truly looking at apis to help drive our business forward while also innovating across products processes and people we should probably start looking at apis in a different way what if we change things up a little bit here's an option application product interface being able to build products and new digital experiences is essential for business today a few weeks ago i was having this discussion on uh linkedin with a group and the comment was made that ignoring application integration scenarios means ignoring 98 of the scenarios where apis are used in the real world today well my response aligns with how today's smart enterprises need to think about apis i stated no matter what the integration is at the start of an api's life is a value proposition that must result in a business outcome otherwise you wouldn't need the integration in the first place this is a complete mindset shift apis are not just about integration apis must be treated as products no different than any other product you design build or manage in your organization when you design api products you should ask questions like what problems do my users face how do i make the api product easy to consume do i start designing api products for an internal audience or just jump right into an external audience can proxies be reused in multiple api products how can i measure the impact of my api products the answers to these questions will form your api product strategy and the strategy must support your business and you can manage your apis as we were just talking about like other products in your organization with its own product life cycle design your apis from an outside in perspective document them so application developers can innovate faster market your apis to attract new opportunities allowing others to help you innovate and of course analyze what works and what doesn't work so that you can iterate on your apis and if you want to get really crazy find ways to monetize your new api products there are numerous approaches such as revenue sharing fee based models or even freemium allowing api consumers to play with your apis in a sandbox before subscribing today in hundreds of organizations globally apis have become the business a great example for monetization is with accuweather a global leader in weather data accuweather wanted an easy way to attract developers monetize data via flexible pricing plans and offer a seamless experience that provides customers the potential to build the next big thing within the first two months of going live on the apigee platform nearly 2500 experienced developers paid for and accessed apis to innovate new weather-based applications and as of today accuweather is processing over 30 billion api requests per day another example of monetization is with swisscom the leading telecommunications provider in switzerland providing phone internet and other services for millions of customers swisscom established an api program using apogee to bridge its network and resources to outside apps and products as a result of their focus on productization of their apis swisscom generates millions in revenue solely through their apogee api program but you know maybe we can look at apis another way how about application process interface streamlining innovation by using a platform like apogee with tools that allows your company to be more nimble might be a good way to look at the value of apis most companies are faced with this challenge the rate of change and updates at the esb layer and systems of records is very slow taking months or longer to update back-end systems to support customer demands while at the top your customers expect those new digital experiences to be available in days or sooner apogee edge can balance the pace of change between your back-end systems and your front-end digital experiences within one platform your business can now quickly scale manage analyze and secure apis and data connections in order to focus more on the connected digital experiences that are going to drive your business growth another way to streamline processes is to look at a basic ci cd workflow continuous integration and continuous delivery these processes will help your organization fluidly innovate while maintaining internal governance and adoption across your entire business your apis can flow through this process allowing your api consumers to develop new experiences and innovate faster while also helping deliver new connected experiences to market faster which if you remember from our statistics earlier we'll directly help you keep up with the expectations of your customers and keep them happy and don't forget that enterprises can drastically accelerate app development by seamlessly leveraging cloud services to reduce development time improve security reach new markets and be more flexible to the changing consumer demands and markets the real hidden benefit of app modernization with api management in the cloud is that an organization is now strategically positioned to lift and shift workloads or take advantage of service offerings from cloud providers based on regional availability cost quality of services or the relative superiority of one cloud versus another in terms of delivering a specific capability that you might need this process interface helps to accelerate time to market increases the overall consumption and standardization of your data throughout your organization and greatly decreases the chance for your business to be disrupted these are each the very definition of open innovation and here's a great example of a company that has sustained the test of time while evolving their business using apis pitney bowes a 100 year old company that is best known for postage meters discovered that leveraging apogee they were able to reduce their time to market for new application development from 18 months to four months as a result pitney bose looks at apis as an entirely new line of business continuous process improvement using apis was their innovation a more recent company cars.com took the same approach to modernizing their application development by enabling self-service onboarding and reporting tools for business users cars.com was able to speed up their seller success and improve the overall visibility into api calls for policies around rate limiting throttling and security their focus on process interfaces has helped grow their api program by over and twenty five percent how about we look at apis one more way application people interface strong businesses link every decision back to improving their value propositions and in my experience apis deliver the most value when serving as an interface between a company and people from digital marketplaces and content platforms to smart homes and wearable devices across virtually all industries connected experiences are redefining how customers interact with businesses and how businesses must engage with customers and here is another stat that speaks to your need for apis by 2020 connected experiences will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator and 86 percent of buyers will pay more for that experience apis can no longer be a technology play you must leverage apis to connect with people api design from an api first mindset begins with your customers typically businesses look at apis as a means by which to expose the data on their backend systems out to their customers this is called an inside out perspective when enterprises focus solely on integration or exposing data from the inside out they completely miss the opportunities to innovate new connected experiences for their customers apogee helps you design and deploy apis from an outside-in perspective this approach focuses on the customer's view of your business first leveraging their digital persona for engaging with your products and services and enabling you to create connected experiences that resonate with their expectations those experiences are built by app developers or consumers of your api products built by your api team and that then touch your back end systems outside in beginning with a digital persona you can map new experiences with an outside in perspective if done right this exercise helps bring business and technology stakeholders together to understand what connected experiences need to be developed what apis need to be available to make those experiences a reality and if the back-end systems need to be updated to support the new products and services apogee and apis can help you seamlessly accelerate your innovation process application people interfaces allow enterprises to express parts of their business as digital experiences when someone orders a movie ticket via a voice assistant that transaction is only possible because the voice assistant can call an api that expresses capabilities such as showtime lookup or location search and transaction approvals regardless of whether a developer is familiar with the underlying technology businesses leverage apis to connect people to their technology and the product that the customers care about becomes those experiences because ultimately if your customers are happy you will grow your business or to simplify this formula happy customers equals organizational value consider a company like autodesk their entire goal was to build apis that were tailored to their customers needs through the apigee platform they were able to boost their customer engagement by three times while also improving time to deployment by 87 the company relentlessly looks at the ever-changing demands of people and quickly innovates new technologies with apis to keep up with those demands another example is with philips a global technology company that developed a smart lighting platform for their hue connected lights fully controlled by a smartphone app with apis philips took the approach to let their engineers focus on product development and new digital experiences rather than managing technical integrations this customer-centric management of their apis now supports over 25 million lighting requests daily their goal was simple interface their business with people in each of these examples the key is to understand that innovation does not need to be revolutionary you must learn how to fail faster then iterate so you can innovate sooner when you return to your work find the opportunities that allow your organization to evolve to quickly work on new ideas to keep up with your changing markets and to iterate towards innovation apogee is a leader in full life cycle api management this is our fourth year in a row that we've been named a leader and gartner has positioned apogee overall highest for our ability to execute your api vision and more than 700 enterprises are using apogee today to build api programs that generate new business opportunities and help innovate new experiences for their customers if you have specific questions about how apis are being used in an industry or just in general as i said earlier please reach out to me i'm happy to talk to you about it and finally i wanted to share with you a tool we have called compass apogee compass is an assessment tool that measures your company's digital maturity across 10 dimensions after the webcast head over to compass.apogee.com or you can do a google search for apogee compass we have 10 questions 10 dimensions and you can do it in about 10 minutes and when you have your score share it with me i'd love to see where you're at let's open it up for some questions i see some questions coming in looks good oh lots of good questions here uh let's see will this deck be available later yes absolutely we are recording this uh i believe we will have it available in a video format and post it on youtube we'll get the link out share it and then you can share it with your colleagues co-workers or anybody else okay let's see uh i agree with your points but every time i bring up the value of apis to my ceo or cio they tell me that apis are for software so go talk with the technology teams how do i convince them that apis are about more than integrations it's a great question um actually i would say that this is exactly why we kind of put this presentation together i would start off by saying look application product interfaces application process interfaces application people interfaces whatever one kind of resonates well with you is probably going to resonate well with your ceo start by explaining that apis really are about more than integrations and that you want to talk to them or or discuss with them how they can help drive the business forward not just work on technology pieces i think if you leverage some of the things that we've talked about today and again focus a lot on say the people connectivity and and being able to meet the demands of the consumers that will be a good starting point for you in terms of uh how do you kind of sell this internally and get it going up to your ceo level or executives that care more about the business piece okay let's see what else you mentioned apis can help us get to market faster but our security teams always holds up our innovation opportunities what can we tell security in order to prevent them from blocking innovation yeah that's a good question uh if you go back into the presentation a moment ago we were talking a little bit you know about process interface and believe it or not a lot of the things that we have built into apogee as a platform including things like rate limiting and oauth and some security features a lot of the policies are there in a way so that you don't have to jeopardize security at the cost of trying to innovate more you should be able to do both in fact all of these companies and the references that i've shared with you today they all have the same type of problems you have a security team you have governance regulations your pipeline for your life cycles all have this structure in it and you're trying to kind of break free of that so you can do new and cool and exciting things you've got to be able to leverage some of those policies that are already in place so that you can standardize on on security best practices that again open you up to innovation also the platform in general allows you to do things like mocking api responses so now you don't really need security because they're not actually touching the back end you're mocking of apis can be used just to kind of share with other partners share throughout your ecosystem and maybe you can innovate that way and then once you have something then you can start talking about how do you reuse the policies that are in place to more secure those apis possibly it's a good question uh email me and you know we can talk a little bit more about that specifically let's see i find the thought of monetizing apis interesting but you're talking about monetizing the experiences consumers have not really the integration pieces right um well what i am talking about is actually monetizing the api itself so let's say you've got an api that does a lookup to all of your locations so for a retail store this might not make sense right because in retail you want people to find you so all of that location data is probably already published out there you know we can look for it on google right my my favorite store closest location to me and that's going to be there but when we look at other data that might be very valuable to your organization if we take an example of like accuweather that is a master at monetizing their data they've got weather forecasting information and they can then sell the actual transaction of that api and they've packaged it in a way so that consumers can come in buy packages of data that they want and then go off and develop new applications on behalf of accuweather so there's hundreds of applications out there and all of those applications are using the apis that accuweather has published and those developers are paying for that access so when we talk about monetizing your api products we are actually looking at ways that you can monetize the apis themselves and what that ultimately will do is open up new lines of business for you it's an entirely new revenue stream that is now coming in that you can add to your bottom line that's the key uh let's see a couple more and and then we're going to be out of time uh connecting people to technology really makes sense today but our software engineers don't see it that way uh like in the pitney's example how do you get engineers to change their view of apis another great question um so there is a challenge i think for a lot of organizations to begin getting this adoption of how do we look at apis it takes a lot to kind of transition from looking at apis as application programming interfaces right where we we clearly know that these are ways to integrate systems and integrate software and to kind of speed up the development process of building applications and i think if you go to really any engineering department they're going to say yeah we have apis and yeah we develop new apis and that's great but when you begin to kind of focus on a different perspective of that when you start looking from this outside in perspective in saying what do our customers want and then i'm going to build an api that delivers what they want and i'm only going to connect that to the back end when it makes sense now you're starting to shift that mindset and it is hard it's very hard to kind of completely change how engineers look at apis but once again i think the the context of this uh entire webcast was to paint apis in a different way so that you can take that and you can go off and you can say look we want to innovate and we want to look at apis differently so that we can achieve these really interesting and exciting things that we know our customers are asking for that's the key and and maybe it starts by actually having a meeting where you bring together your business teams and your technology teams and you kind of outline what that vision is and as you come together as a kind of a cohesive view of apis then i think you're going to be able to get to where pitney bowes is at okay let's see we'll we'll get one more in here uh do you see apis being used differently in different industries no um yeah you know it's it's an interesting question but the reality is is um i think at the end of the day i share with people and and i share with customers this simple uh idea do you have customers i think in every single situation whether you're b2c or even if you're b to b those b to b situations the other businesses are still your customers everybody has customers and everybody is trying to meet the demands of those customers so they're all using apis in a way that allows them to accelerate their development build new things again reach markets faster all these things we've been talking about today but ultimately it's in a way that you can meet the demands of customers and since everybody has customers all of the industries are basically just applying the api philosophies to meet the needs of their customers differently but again i guess at the at the end of the day it's really not that different i want to develop something and i want to research it and i want to give it to my customers and i want to analyze it i i have kpis i have internal goals i want to meet those goals i want to grow my business right i think it doesn't really matter what industry you're in you're all going to be trying to accomplish the same thing and you're all looking for ways to innovate and as i've said apis bring a lot of value to your ability to innovate and i think that's a great way to end once again thank you all for listening i appreciate the time and as i mentioned you've got my email address once more i'm chris hood i'm with apogee part of google cloud you can reach me at chrishood google.com feel free to email me and let

me know if there's anything i can help you with thank you again have a great day you

2021-02-18 23:11

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