API management and innovation can make businesses essential

How do you change your business from just being relevant to your customers to being essential?
The API economy has turned the concept of what it means to go to market completely upside down. The crux of this shift is the ability to use APIs to innovate faster, connect with more partners, and expand the scope of potential customers and new products.
What differentiates a business may not be a tangible product or an offer.  It might be a nugget of data or a simple service that differentiates your business in the wide field of competitors, current and future. That creates an opportunity to change not just your place in the industry, but potentially the entire industry itself.
When people ask me to describe the API economy, I keep going back to one critical aspect: innovation. It sounds cliché, but innovation occurs when you bring together interesting combinations in new ways to create business value that fills an unmet customer need better than your competitors.
APIs present one of the fastest ways to create those new combinations. Enabling teams to collaborate quickly to identify and get to market that new, unique value your customers need. To succeed, organizations must detect market changes and turn those needs into new offerings faster than their competitors. That is how a business becomes essential to customers and develops new, untapped markets.
Where does one get started? In many cases, what we have found is that setting a leading pace in the API economy requires more than any single-point technology product. Instead, it requires  a comprehensive solution with flexibility, scalability and responsiveness as companies quickly create and use APIs as a critical part of their strategies.
That is why IBM has striven to continually evolve IBM API Connect. Through the acquisition of StrongLoop, IBM has created a comprehensive solution which enables customers to create, manage, secure and publish APIs for both an internal and external consumer base. By providing API Connect as a service within the IBM Bluemix platform, it is easier to develop, integrate, and launch APIs and applications in record time.
We believe that thanks to ongoing collaboration with customers, proactive feedback and a joint commitment to being essential to customers, Forrester analysts have positioned IBM as a leader in the API management solution in “The Forrester Wave: API Management Solutions, Q4 2016.”*
IBM has also been named a leader in the “Gartner Magic Quadrant for Full Life Cycle API Management.”** With a holistic approach to transformation that combined API management, platform as a service (PaaS) and integration strategy, IBM delivered a solution that sets it apart in the market.
Read the Forrester Wave report
Read Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Full Life Cycle API Management.
Learn more and begin your free trial of API Connect on Bluemix.
* The Forrester Wave: API Management Solutions, Q4 2016
** Gartner Magic Quadrant for Full Life Cycle API Management, Paolo Malinverno, Mark O’Neill, October 27, 2016.  Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
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