Implementing Amplify Enterprise Marketplace

Develop a business value and solution alignment strategy

Like all successful endeavors, a meeting of the minds of critical stakeholders – including Axway – needs to take place. Axway gets the ball rolling by conducting a detailed API marketplace strategy workshop to address all the important elements and milestones that will shape your solution and put you on a fast-track to business value.

Additionally, at this critical business/solution alignment stage, project scheduling and integration requirements will need to be defined based on a range of priorities and dependencies.

Leveraging the universal API management platform

Your Enterprise Marketplace solution is built on the Amplify Platform – Axway's universal API management platform. Because of this, your API teams can develop and govern APIs across integration patterns – API, MFT, and B2B integration – whether it's on-premises or in any cloud. That frees your API team from operating within restrictive dependencies dictated by vendor gateways that can significantly hamper your API strategy and developer experience.

Activate your Amplify Enterprise Marketplace solution

Amplify Enterprise Marketplace runs on a SaaS platform that utilizes lightweight agents to automatically discover APIs, provision APIs, and track usage of your APIs. The agents need to be co-located with the API gateway that's hosting them currently. This involves answering a set of configuration questions and building a small executable program that is then installed with the gateway. Securing and opening ports for connection to the Amplify SaaS platform is a step that usually involves your security team.

Populating your API Marketplace

Once agents are deployed and have access to the platform, a service registry then gets populated with all the discovered APIs that have been analyzed, categorized, and normalized. Linting rules are then configured for design and security policies that are run against discovered API assets to validate them. Axway experts are with you every step of the process to ensure your API solution is set up to align with the business outcomes you've defined.

Configuring and tailoring your API marketplace

The API marketplace configuration and tailoring phase is all about building a better experience for your targeted developer office. Axway experts help you set up authorization and access controls. This can include using an existing identity provider which requires careful configuration and integration. You'll need to think about the structure of your teams and roles and configure the solution accordingly. Then document your policies for support, escalation, and usage.

Start with an API product mindset

APIs are just like any other product. It needs to be packaged, marketed, and delivered. This means curating individual technical APIs into higher-level API products that will deliver a specific business-level capability to a specific developer audience. Embracing this important premise will help others in your organization grasp the idea of turning products into business value.

Creating API products means providing not just the API, but also the documentation, use cases, sample code, SLAs, and more as the complete package. Axway experts can show you how to configure these products for monetization if this is part of your API strategy. You'll be able to integrate your API marketplace subscription approval process into each API product.

Going live with your API marketplace

We've reached the point where you need to get your API storefront ready for its grand opening. A soft release comes first. This involves testing your API marketplace with alpha users, monitoring various analytics against defined KPIs, and making final adjustments accordingly. In this way, you're able to develop the API product intelligence needed to keep your API initiatives on track.

Knowing what you want to measure at the outset is critical to aligning your API marketplace performance to its business value proposition. Some metrics to consider are KPIs associated with API management, such as streamlining business processes and sharing data. Other intelligence metrics are centered around solution efficiency and resilience – for example, the number of consumers and applications using your APIs business service capabilities your API products deliver.

Getting developers to use your API marketplace

Consider using things like leaderboards or gamifying some aspects of the marketplace to attract developers – internal and external – and get them to adopt your APIs. The next step is to simplify the process they have to go through to adopt your API product.

Enterprise Marketplace, with its centralized control, and curated packaging of API business service capabilities, makes the process of discovering specific APIs simple. It will show them how to try out the API, offer documentation that answers their questions, and provide steps for subscribing and gaining access credentials so they can put it into production.

Ready to fast-track API adoption and business value with Amplify Enterprise Marketplace?

Contact us to get started