Enterprise customers who want true integration of all their data, from their own data estate, online applications, and partners are best served by using data APIs and the connectors that implement them.

The advantages are many. To begin with, data APIs are perfectly congruous with the purpose of their application: data integration. But beyond mere thematic unity, they bring with them the power of ecosystem, wherein the vast majority of developers, data scientists, and data engineers already have the skillsets they need to utilize data APIs. BI tools can consume data APIs directly, rather than relying on developers to use conventional APIs and extract data into a staging database for downstream BI tool consumption.

The power of volume applies as well. It is obvious that data APIs work well for one-off integration requirements. But when data from numerous applications must be integrated, the value of data APIs becomes most evident. That’s because each additional application requires only incremental effort to on-board, rather than a full soup-to-nuts adoption of a new API. Ongoing effort is optimized as well, because moving away from code built around different APIs avoids jarring context switches and paradigm shifts for developers.

Custom ODBC or JDBC for REST APIs is a sound strategy to open your enterprise applications to a wider audience. Partnering with ISVs who offer Data API Management solutions can help you accelerate this journey.

Even applications that support well-adopted REST APIs can benefit from creation of a data API. This manifests as a custom ODBC or JDBC for REST connectors and is a sound strategy on its own, opening the enterprise application to a wider audience. Even users of the native REST API may find a data API useful as a secondary mode of access, depending on the use case. Partnering with ISVs who offer Data API Management solutions can help you accelerate this journey.

APIs build ecosystems, and the more readily adoptable an API is, the greater the ecosystem will be. Data APIs are arguably the most compelling for adoption. Their compatibility with BI tools allows the capabilities of the API to be browsed visually, even by developers who may plan to consumer the data API from code.

Acquiring a suite of high-performance connectors provides perhaps the best way for organizations to build 360-degree views of their customers. Such connectors enable the data API approach, which is the enterprise’s best bet in taming today’s reality of data dispersal and fragmentation.

Slaying the data entropy dragon is the key to a well-curated data estate and that, in turn, is the key to building a data-driven organization. If digital transformation is to be more than a poetic phrase, if it is to be a tangible, actionable goal for enterprise organizations, then data-driven operation is critical. Data APIs underlie that critical component today and they provide the best positioning and readiness for adopting new applications and other sources of data into the future.

Data APIs: The Gateway to Data-Driven Operation and Digital Transformation

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