SOA Software, a provider of Enterprise API Management and SOA Governance solutions, published a new eBook, Building Successful APIs.  The eBook, which is available for immediate free download, provides a thorough look at what it takes to succeed with APIs in a large enterprise.  SOA Software wrote and published the eBook based on its experience working with global corporations that are facing a transformation of IT requirements from rapidly evolving business alliances and mobile device proliferation.

According to Paolo Malinverno, Gartner Research VP, "The use of Web APIs is increasing even more, generally supporting new sales channels through mobile applications. This has made API management more popular as a new way of informing and selling to end customers. In particular, Type A organizations keen on exploring new ways to connect with their customers increasingly equate a Web channel to a new business opportunity; for them, having good API management is initially just a way of opening a new opportunity, and evolves into an advanced way of collecting customer behavior data." [i]

The need to create new revenue streams and integrate with an ever-shifting set of partners and applications, especially in this mobile era, puts pressure on IT to create and manage APIs.  Daniel Sholler, Gartner Research VP, puts the challenge in perspective: "RESTful APIs help organizations integrate with partners and suppliers, lower costs, speed execution and reach new markets. Architects and application managers must follow good designs and best practices to create effective APIs," he said. [ii]

"The eBook addresses an information gap in how to build successful APIs," said Roberto Medrano, Executive Vice President, SOA Software. "While there are some resources for people developing consumer-facing APIs, enterprises require a different approach and more information to produce APIs.

This book gives them much-needed information about building APIs in the enterprise context."

The eBook shares proven best practices that enable businesses to realize success from APIs and ensure appropriate  security and system management or running up unsustainable costs. Taking a holistic, integrated approach, it blends technology and business-level issues that affect API development.

The eBook covers the following conceptual topics:

• Creating awareness of the challenges and opportunities inherent in APIs.
• Determining the business requirements that drive API development.
• Understanding what the API does.
• Creating an infrastructure and platform to host APIs.
• Describing changes needed by IT and business to successfully launch and operate an API.
• Supporting a development community for the API.

The eBook can be downloaded at soa.com.

Enabling the API Economy
Enterprises are increasingly making business applications available as APIs in order to drive business growth and expose new revenue and partnership opportunities, and ultimately to improve business effectiveness. Open APIs allow external developers to build applications that leverage core business capabilities. Enterprise APIs are offered to a more exclusive group to enable more demanding and subtle B2B or B2E (employee) applications. Both enterprise and open APIs are typically built on a foundation of enterprise SOA services. As such, they require robust governance.

The SOA Software Enterprise API Platform is the first solution to address enterprise requirements across the entire API lifecycle, with planning, development, runtime and community management capabilities.  The Enterprise API Platform provides a rich set of API Management capabilities to ensure the security, performance and availability of APIs, together with a social developer community solution for promoting and supporting the APIs and driving developer adoption.  It provides end-to-end management of the API lifecycle, helping you make sure that you build the right APIs, build them the right way, and make sure that they are behaving correctly.  The Enterprise API Platform is available as an on-premise software solution, as-a-service, via an Open developer community as-a-service, or using a combination of any of these options.  For example, a customer could choose to run the lifecycle management components of the solution as on-premises software, use the commercial PaaS offering to host and manage their APIs, and federate with the Open developer community to publish their public APIs to an established group of App developers.

About SOA Software
SOA Software is a leading provider of Enterprise API Management and SOA governance products that enable customers to plan, build, run and share enterprise services and APIs.  The world's largest companies including Bank of America, Pfizer, and Verizon use SOA Software products to harness the power of their technology and transform their businesses.  Gartner placed SOA Software in the Leaders Quadrant for the 2011 "Magic Quadrant for SOA Governance Technologies." The company is also recognized as a "Leader" by the Forrester Research Waves for Integrated SOA Governance , SOA Management, and SOA Life Cycle Management.   For more information, please visit http://www.soa.com.

[i] Gartner, Hype Cycle for Application Development, 2012, Application Service Governance, Paolo Malinverno

[ii] Gartner, Best Practices for RESTful APIs, March 27 2012, Daniel Sholler