Traditional organizations are increasingly becoming software producing organizations. This software is enabling them to integrate business processes between different departments and with other organizations through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). The main task of managing APIs is to ensure that the APIs are easy to use by third parties, such as providing helpful documentation, monitoring API performance, and even monetizing API usage. The knowledge on API management is scattered across academic literature. In this document, we describe a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) that has the goal of collecting API Management practices and capabilities related to API Management, as well as proposing a comprehensive definition of the topic. In the scope of this work, a practice is defined as any practice that has the express goal to improve, encourage and manage the usage of APIs. Capabilities are defined as the ability to achieve a certain goal related to API Management, through the execution of two or more interrelated practices. We follow a standard method for SLRs in software engineering. We managed to collect 24 unique definitions for the topic, 114 practices and 39 capabilities.

Identification of Practices and Capabilities in API Management: A Systematic Literature Review.

Low-code development platforms are environments that enable citizen developers without software engineering knowledge to create software products. These software products range from small business applications to large business platforms, around which software ecosystems increasingly form. In these software ecosystems, different organizations want to extend the created software products with services and software, with the goal of creating active enterprise networks that create value collaboratively. Well designed and maintained application programming interfaces are crucial for these organizations.

API Management Maturity of Low-Code Development Platforms

In the last decade, the software industry embraced a new development paradigm called software ecosystems. In this setting, multiple businesses act together as a unit and interact with a shared market for software and services. Ecosystems often result from opening a technology in the form of a platform so that it can receive external contributions from independent developers, small companies, resellers, and other actors. This open innovation phenomenon involves not just big players such as Google and Apple, but also SMEs seeking to co-create new solutions that facilitate their entrance into new markets. The challenging coordination of such distributed development must enable secure sourcing, integration, deployment, and evolution of the software solutions created by multiple complementors. An issue that has grown in importance with the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation in 2018 is compliance with relevant data protection legislation. Our goal therefore is to analyse how privacy requirements affect software development in such ecosystems. As main contribution, we present an analysis of (i) data protection roles in a software ecosystem together with (ii) a set of challenges for data protection to platform companies, based on GDPR specification.

Privacy in Software Ecosystems - An Initial Analysis of Data Protection Roles and Challenges

Digital platform businesses challenge incumbents by utilizing an ecosystem of actors that provide benefits to customers like cost reduction, convenience, or complementary products and services. Traditional enterprises should transform in order not to lose market share. This transformation potentially induces drastic changes to business models, organizational strategy, business processes, and corporate culture, among others. This chapter aims to understand how incumbent software vendors adapt to digital platform-mediated settings. The research methodology is grounded in an in-depth case study. The work contributes with a description of practical implications exposing implementation challenges, strategic decisions regarding the multiple roles in an ecosystem, criteria to select alliances, the degree of openness, and how to go from idea to action. These findings therefore enrich the literature on digital platform management.

How Incumbents Respond Strategically to Emerging Digital Platform-Mediated Settings?: Analysis of Enterprise Software Vendors

The value creation potential of the Internet of Things (IoT), that is the connection of arbitrary objects to the Internet, lies in the creation of business benefits through accessing and processing the circa 80 Zettabytes (1 ZB = 10^21 Bytes) of data produced by an estimated 40 billions of IoT endpoints (prognosis for 2025). This contribution derives and presents the information technology-related fundament and basis required to be able to reap this potential. Quantity and heterogeneity of the devices and machines especially encountered in the industry at large in the so-called industrial IoT (IIoT) require the use of a typically cloud-based IoT platform for logical concentration and more efficient management of the -- unavoidable in industry -- complexity. Stringent non-functional requirements especially regarding (low) latency, (high) bandwidth, access to large processing capacities, and security and privacy-related aspects necessitate the deployment of intermediary IoT gateways endowed with different capability sets in the edge continuum between IoT endpoints and the IoT platform in the cloud. This will be illustrated in the form of two use cases from corporate projects using a component architecture view point. Finally we argue that this classical concept of IoT projects needs to be strategically widened towards application integration (key word: IT/OT integration) and API management resulting in the coupling of a suitable integration and API management platforms to the IoT platform in order to use this end-to-end understanding of IoT/IIoT to fully leverage the innovation-stimulating and transformational character of IIoT and Industry 4.0.

End-to-end-Architekturen zur Datenmonetarisierung im IIoT. Konzepte und Implementierungen.

The API has become a cornerstone of software ecosystems, providing ways to drive innovation inside and outside the organization. Because of this criticality, we should manage APIs. The purpose of this study is to identify and classify the challenges that organizations evolving into internal ecosystems are facing as they have to deal with APIs. We performed a qualitative research study on three Siemens internal ecosystems with different sizes, technologies, and age. The results reveal that even if we are talking about the API economy, organizations are struggling with different aspects of API management related to Business, Architecture, Process, and Organization. The challenges identified in this paper provide a basis for future research.

Sebastien Andreo

Papers

API management challenges in ecosystems