API Marketplace Q&A | How do I make the business case for an API marketplace?

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Transcript
Lydia Defranchi: Hello, and welcome to our “What’s next” series, where we answer some questions about how to get to the next step of your API journey with a marketplace.
You’re probably at a point where your company has a relatively robust API program, but you’re not sure if these initiatives are moving the needle in terms of business. Here to help get you there is William McKinney, Axway’s Senior Director of Amplify Platform Marketing…
So William, a good place to start for someone who’s thinking about how to drive adoption for the APIs they have built, is investigating an API Marketplace. When API product owners figure out an API marketplace is what they need, the next questions is … how do I make the business case for an API marketplace?
William McKinney: That's a great question. A good place to start. What we found in our experience in dealing with numerous customers is a lot of them start with a potentially failed opportunity of doing it themselves.
And so they they immediately think about, let me make the business case based on how much money I'm gonna save in a in a traditional kind of IT mindset. I would encourage you not to do that. I would try to establish.
A clear linkage more into the digital business initiatives that your company is running so that it becomes a revenue producing opportunity as opposed to just a cost savings opportunity.
And you know I think the way you do that is figure out which initiatives your company is targeting, how you can impact that by making it go faster, faster realization of the completion of that and the revenue streams associated with it.
You know, I think the next step is then to actually demonstrate how a you know, digital product adoption will drive that business outcome faster.
So that means saying if I can get developers whether they're internal or external, depending upon what your initiative is targeting, how I can get them to be able to find and test and actually put in production the API products that are necessary to do that -- showing how that will actually help drive that outcome of the business outcome, the revenue outcome faster is probably the key element of getting the business case started inside of your organization.
And then I would look at maybe some specific measures of like a direct or indirect monetization or potentially internal chargeback that can be used to help track the realization of the financial outcome.
And show your results, not just show the number of subscriptions or the amount of API traffic that you've done. I think those are the the the beginning points.
You can definitely still use cost. We found some companies are spending up to $1,000,000 a year and trying to build their own marketplace and then they realize that that has to be an ongoing cost because they have to modify it and continue to tweak the automation and the look and feel, and adding new features.... and that's just not the business that most companies are in, so revenue, I would start with revenue, cost as a second, but I think those will get you on a good start.
Lydia: Awesome, thanks William and we'll be back with the next steps of the journey for you coming right up!
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