The Future of Business IT Integrations: Strategic Costs and Value of APIs
How to go about API-integration effectively.
The decision to use or not use APIs can sometimes be difficult for business leaders, as many external APIs come at a cost. However, there are also costs that come with the decision not to use APIs as part of your development process, highlights Gleb Polyakov of Nylas.
Striking the right balance between optimizing operational efficiency and pushing the limits of innovation can be a pivotal challenge. Particularly today, as market volatility and an increasingly digital and interconnected world have pushed business and IT strategies closer together than ever before. One of the ways in which companies are aiming to thread this needle and achieve success at scale is through the use of APIs. In fact, in our 2023 State of Developer Experience Report, we found that a staggering 86% of developers said that they anticipate their usage of APIs to increase this year. While developers overwhelmingly understand the unparalleled technical advantages that can be had by integrating APIs, many organizations still grapple with identifying the business case for seeking out third-party APIs.
What many fail to realize is that APIs are not all-or-nothing. The reality is that not every project will require the use of APIs, and that is perfectly fine. However, leaning into external APIs when appropriate can greatly alleviate any unforeseen delays within the development cycle, mitigate burnout within your product and engineering teams, and ultimately, bring to the surface any unforeseen costs that can negatively impact your teams, your product roadmap, and your customers.
See More: How Cloud-Native Can Simplify Legacy App Modernization
Here are a few ways in which APIs can mitigate hidden and unexpected expenses and challenges.
Optimizing Productivity Through Automation
Business leaders have always been interested in identifying and implementing different ways to boost user productivity. By weaving APIs throughout the building process, developers can redefine their workflows and how they build and ship innovative code. And now, with the addition of AI and automation, productivity gains can be enhanced even more.
Integrating both APIs and AI allows for the creation of automated workflows that can go beyond just the development process. They are able to help ensure critical components of the building process such as data integrity are not overlooked. When developers have the right tools and the right data, productivity can and will thrive.
Financial Efficiency and Time Management
While developers and technical teams are always looking to innovate and build disruptive products and applications, the reality is that if it cannot generate ROI for the business, it likely will not make it onto the roadmap. However, ROI goes beyond simply generating revenue from end-users. What many organizations can sometimes fail to realize is that significant ROI can be generated simply by emphasizing efficiency and time management. Without the use of APIs, constructing and maintaining these integrations can take upwards of months or even years. And considering that the average salary for a software developer in the United States is more than $150,000, with developers in competitive markets such as New York and the Bay Area making even more, extrapolating the financial implications of lengthy development cycles and not using APIs becomes even more compelling.
With their ability to help teams build and maintain integrations with less code, APIs can directly help trim down the time and resources needed to complete these complex projects.
Navigating the Product Roadmap
The modern product roadmap is anything but static. It is a living document with constant iteration and innovation. However, ask any product or engineering leader, and they’ll be the first to tell you that product roadmaps can be a double-edged sword. While they provide a transparent direction for the product’s vision, direction, and the value it can bring to its users, roadmaps are often met with bugs, customer requests, and missed timelines. APIs can not only help mitigate these issues, they also can act as a roadmap accelerator by streamlining product evolution and innovation by allowing developers and teams to be more nimble and creative.
In the absence of APIs, any updates or fixes to a product or feature can take a significant amount of time and even suffer delays. Not only does this slow down the time to market and missed ROI opportunities, it likely ends up taking resources away from other projects in order to address any urgent issues, thus causing delays elsewhere as well.
APIs, however, can help facilitate the evolution and growth of a product and its roadmap by preventing stagnation and accelerating innovation. In a customer-orientated market where product differentiation heavily impacts customer satisfaction and, ultimately, retention, being able to showcase the ability to adapt and address customer feedback can be the difference between customer churn and customer loyalty.
The Organization-wide Impact of API Integration
While the integration of APIs can be a technical endeavor, their impact can stretch across an entire organization. An API-first approach is more than simply a technical perspective. It is a business perspective. It demands a long-term view that expands beyond immediate project costs to encapsulate the broader landscape of potential expenditures and savings.
While it is crucial to recognize that not all aspects of software development require APIs, for businesses and IT teams looking to move fast, break down siloes, and, ultimately, drive down costs, APIs should be a significant component of your IT strategy. With APIs in their toolkit, development teams can feel confident that they are building true competitive differentiation and doing so cost-effectively and efficiently.
Have you included a focus on APIs in your IT strategy? Share with us on Facebook, X, and LinkedIn. We’d love to hear from you!
Image Source: Shutterstock
MORE ON API
