APIs might be used to provide smoother service to your customer base, your suppliers, your business partners, prospective customers, or even the general public. To give one example, your company might use an API to monetize the informational capabilities of the data services you provide. Sometimes called the “API economy,” this refers to the controlled exposure of a company’s digital services and data-related assets through APIs. The ultimate goal of the API economy? To facilitate the creation of user-focused applications that support line-of-business goals, streamline workflows, and improve the user experience.

You might also seek to enhance your customers’ experiences by enabling API connectivity into their operations, which in turn delivers greater visibility, more detailed and real-time insights, and a greater wealth of decision-making data. And, through the use of APIs your company can enable access to business data through custom-built applications.

Some companies have turned to APIs as a better alternative to older and more dated “EDI” programs as a means to exchange data between businesses. Although IT integrations experts are a scarcity in the labor market, finding EDI expertise is much more challenging.

API integration leaves a number of business problems unsolved. Significant issues can remain:

• Many companies discover that after putting a great deal of work into developing and publishing APIs, they aren’t actually being used that much.
• Even when the APIs are used, IT integration coders are still needed to consume and write code to and from the APIs. The scarcity of availability of the skill set can cause bottlenecks and delays, increasing the time business customers must wait for the value they’ve been promised. Your original motivation for using APIs might have been to evolve beyond other forms of existing B2B integration, such as batch EDI, where the experts needed are even more scarce. But even with APIs, delays and bottlenecks remain, and the problem remains unsolved.
• When using APIs, your company is actually shifting the labor-intensive problems inherent in B2B integration onto your customers or business partners. Now those customers or business partners must expend their own resources, time, and money to get connected through your APIs. This also delays the realization of promised value and can result in a frustrating customer experience.
• Beyond the initial setup of API integration, there’s an on-going need for maintenance to be performed by the same scarce IT integration experts, increasing the cost and robbing them from other business priorities. A few examples of common ongoing expertise include:
  • Upgrading API code to address newer and evolving API security standards
  • Automating exception handling (such as handling unplanned outages and other quality issues)
  • The extension of APIs that provide more efficient performance needs or more functional capabilities that serve evolving business needs

Adeptia Connect is a self-service data integration solution. It can work on top of your existing data integration tech stack including API gateway platforms such as those offered by Mulesoft, Boomi, Jitterbit and others. Adeptia’s self-service integration enables you to:

• Get more out of your API integration investments
• Open additional (and easier) ways for your business customers to implement data integration and exchange data with you
• Provide a means by which your non-techie business users can quickly and easily implement data integration with new business customers
• Provide a self-service portal to non-techie business customers enabling them to self-provision and connect, monitor and manage data exchanges between your company and theirs across all integration channels (API, EDI, FTP, etc.)
• Free up scarce IT integration experts within your business and enable business customers to integrate without needing IT talent that’s in short supply on their end too

Adeptia software enables you to put the work of B2B data integration in the hands of your business users rather than your overworked IT integration coders. Adeptia’s software, using AI and machine learning, reduces bottlenecks, gets customers and business partners the value they’ve been promised much more quickly, and alleviates the workload of scarce and costly IT experts.

Adeptia also offers a customer portal designed for business users to set up, monitor, manage and maintain data integration, including not just API-specific data integration but all other forms of B2B data integration as well. And, because the customer portal is aimed at business users, B2B data integration can be managed and extended without burdening your customer’s or business partner’s IT integration experts.

• Adeptia’s no-code method for publishing your own APIs
• Adeptia’s ability to consume both existing APIs within your enterprise as well as outside APIs
• Adeptia’s API documentation features that enable you to better document your APIs so your users can more easily build and test with them. And, through the use of the Swagger specification, you’ll generate interactive machine- and human-readable API documentation.