Driving Business Partner Adoption with APIs

Editor's Notes

• #3: Why are you partnering it. You’re in business, not altruism.More customers - new channels, new opportunitiesIncrease Value – protect price pointsMore efficient processes – faster, lower-cost business
• #4: Of course it’s a two-way street, your partners are also in business to make money. Why should they work with you?They want to make their own business better by delivering some of your products to their customers. They can either be a simple channel, or can deliver a value-added product. In some cases your partners may build a high-value business around something you offer for free. The value you derive may be quite different – e.g. agronomic data.
• #5: Except for a small number of cases your partners aren’t working with you to use your technology. You don’t sell technology, you sell capabilities (products or services)They are working with you because you offer valuable business capabilities that they want or need.It’s all about synergies. You offer something your partners can use to make more money, and make you more money in the process.That said, your technology is the gateway for your partners to work with your business, so it is important. More on this later.
• #6: It’s not that technology isn’t interesting.There are lots of technology trends that can and will affect your business and your partners’ businesses. Sometimes you’ll leverage partners as technology providers for things like data analytics, active defense or really any of these things. More importantly though, these technology trends will impact the way your business evolves and the way you will interact with your partners.
• #7: So if you want to expose business capabilities to your partners, it’s important to understand what business you’re in. Are you selling products or services. Depending on this you may have different consideration for how technology can help you.Regardless of what your business is, there will almost certainly be a partnering model that will work for you. Our customers span a wide range of industries from Manufacturing, through retail, banking, insurance, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, telecoms, and more.A lot of what partnering is about is finding ways to derive more value from your core business, or from artifacts of your core business. A great example in the retail world is membership cards and rewards points around those cards. E.g. Vons and Chevron. In the manufacturing space you may be looking to offer value added services to your customers via partners, perhaps through product usage data collection and analytics. Maybe this value is passed to your end customers.In the service industry it’s more often about finding new channels and making your current channels more efficient. In the payment processing space one of the hardest things is to on-ramp new customers (think card-swipe terminals in retail stores). Then you also get interesting things like encouraging customers to use their rewards points as currency, e.g. allow them to use AMEX Membership Rewards points on Amazon.com.
• #8: APIs help your business in lots of ways, largely by finding new ways to connect with customers and partners
• #9: Let’s take a quick detour to look at the structure of the modern enterprise.You build applications on infrastructure and expose these application across multiple channels.We can discuss the role of APIs in all of these areas, but for the business impact of partnering we’re going to focus on the channels.That’s not to say that you won’t be partner for your infrastructure or your Applications (think Amazon, Rackspace, or Salesforce), or that you won’t be using APIs to enable these partnerships, but the above the line impact from API enabled partnerships generally happen in the channels layer.
• #10: In the good old days you needed someone to stand behind the counter, respond to mail, and answer the phone. These days you have to consider other ways of reaching your customers, finding new customers, and evening connecting to non-human customers.Simple things like ad placement across a wide array of devices revolve around APIs. Allowing people to browse your product catalog, place orders and track order status. Providing access to analytic data collected by your products - agronomic data, activity tracks (Garmin), or about the way your products work (connected car)Even allowing “things” to self-maintain by ordering replacements as and when needed.
• #12: APIs enable partnering in several ways:Partner on-boardingOr even customer on-boarding facilitated by partners (Payment processor example)Secure Product CatalogPrivate productsOrderingTrackingPublish data services for analyticsSecure Private ServicesContent publicationService exposing for content providersDirect product deliveryPartner as channelAd placement serviceseg Netflix
• #13: OpenPrivateLicensed
• #14: allow anyone access to anything, essentially a public API, but for an API that offers value to businesses rather than to consumers. E.g. Google Analytics (a freemium model), Netflix (consumer centric content, but only really useful to people building TVs etc)
• #15: Offer the API only to selected users. An all-or-nothing model based on invitations.
• #16: Fine-grained controls over which partners can see which aspects of your APIs. Govern search, documents, App to API AccessLicenses can even control QoS for each consumer
• #18: Delivering an API that meets the needs of all your partners. You really don’t want to have to build a new API for each partner.It’s a Governance question – build the right API, build it right, run it right.
• #19: In some cases you may need to create a different API Implementation for each partner, but you should never build the same API more than once. You can let your Gateway take care of the non-functional and implementation specific requirements for you.
• #20: Integrating the App Developer process and the API Admin processesAPI Production GovernanceUser Registration ApprovalProduction endpoint access approval
• #21: Integrating the App Developer process and the API Admin processesAPI Production GovernanceUser Registration ApprovalProduction endpoint access approval
• #22: Keeping partner information separate – often times your partners are each others’ competitors
• #23: Allow just enough access for each partner, you need to give more access and privilege to partners than you do to general users, but you have to manage this accessControlling QoS so that you can prioritize one partner over another
• #24: Measuring what your partners are doing so that can analyze the success (or otherwise) of your channels, and so you can help your customers troubleshoot issues and support them properly.
• #25: Support your partners yourself, and by fostering an active social community