API Marketplaces: Boom or Bust?

In recent years, we’ve seen an explosion of buzz and tooling surrounding API marketplaces. The vision is clear; create a flourishing ecosystem where internal, partner, and/or public consumers can find, understand, and subscribe to your APIs to build better products and services. APIs are productized and directly or indirectly monetized. And fundamentally, we’re able to deliver on the promises of the API economy. But in practice, many marketplaces are falling short in both traction and ROI for organizations.

When setting up a marketplace, many focus on the end result: a set of perfect APIs, advertised in a storefront that provides a great consumer subscribing and onboarding experience. But, without mastering the marketplace supply chain in a way that’s always on and always connected, the marketplace vision becomes just a glamorized developer portal and lacks strategic value.