IBM Software

API management is the

SOA renaissance
Converging SOA and API management as a catalyst for
business innovation and growth

Thought Leadership White Paper

API management is the SOA renaissance

Introduction
A woman using a price comparison service while shopping at a
supermarket or a teenager purchasing movie maker software for
her iPad when visiting a friend are scenes that have become
everyday occurrences in modern society. What has been called
the nexus of forces by Gartner is the confluence of mobile,
social, cloud and big data analytics.1 These trends imply an
experience where context is everything and where important
interactions are not only related to business transactions but can
also be focused on building social relationships and collaborative
ecosystems. Furthermore, interactions of interest to the business
can and will happen between two third parties. As an example,
think of the potential impact, positive or negative, of a YouTube
video gone viral.
Technologies such as mobile devices change the channel of
interaction but more importantly mobile interactions happen in
a different, here and now context. The mobile device is always at
hand and is the preferred way of interacting with the world. Any
information can be accessed while on the move and any friend
can be contacted in real-time for advice. Interactions can also be
asynchronous with information being pushed instead of pulled,
even for classical types of information such as bank account
balances. Furthermore, the growth of social media has created
consumers who expect their opinions to matter and who are not
shy of expressing those opinions publicly in social media. These
characteristics change the scope of what is considered business
relevant and change the ways in which interactions must be
orchestrated, managed and monitored.

Forrester and IBM have defined the term Systems of

Interaction as the overarching concept for new-age business
integration. Systems of Interaction help you drive more engaging applications and processes by seamlessly and intelligently
integrating Systems of Engagement with Systems of Record,
reaching all the way from the mobile device to corporate backend systems.

The case for mobile

The mobile use case deserves special consideration. Partially
because of the obvious operational challenges in areas such as
security and latency but more importantly, because of the business characteristics that are imbued in a differentiating mobile
experience. Mobile users expect a quick response and are always
on the move, often spending only a minute or two in a particular
mobile app before moving on to something else. Consequently,
mobile interactions must be personal to be even relevant and
they must be immediately gratifying. Gone are the days where
customer segmentation was sufficient to provide so-called personalization. Modern users expect you to know who they are and
what they need right in this moment.
As part of the introduction of Systems of Interaction, IBM has
suggested a framework for more engaging and innovative business processes.

IBM Software

Detect
opportunities to
engage customers
(and employees)

Enrich
interaction context
with historical data
and trends

Perceive
in-the-now dynamic
interaction context from
location, time, social media
and other events

Act
on the insight gained
through enrichment and
perception to enable positive
business outcomes

Interactions drive business innovation

Using a retail example, what if you could detect a customer

walking down the street close to one of your stores and then
enrich your understanding of the situation through knowledge
of that customers previous buying behavior? Furthermore, what
if you could perceive that this particular customer last night
tweeted about going on a beach vacation soon and finally act by
immediately sending a SMS with a promotion on swimwear?
When all these steps take place within a few seconds, you will
have created a differentiated and personalized experience that
improves your chance of generating business and likely strengthens your long-term relationship with this customer.

SOA design principles and new business

agendas
The nexus of forces drives new business agendas and information needs. But what drives the solution design to support business innovation? Service oriented architecture (SOA) design

principles are a key enabler for building Systems of Interaction

that are flexible, robust and extensible at the same time. While
historically a lot of focus within SOA initiatives has been on service reuse from a software perspective, in a business context
more importantly, a service is an abstract representation of a
repeatable business task.2
A service as an abstract representation is important because it
allows the service to be projected and accessed beyond the
boundary of a physically controlled environment. A service as a
representation of a business task is important for designing
collaborative business systems above and beyond pure software
integration. Finally, the mediation that is an intrinsic part of the
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) pattern and a fundamental building block of SOA, supports intelligent pairing of consumers
and providers of services, whether those consumers and providers are software or people. This latter point is important. While
in 2005 service mediation was mostly about format and protocol

API management is the SOA renaissance

transformation in the context of IT transactions, in 2013 business mediation connects people, devices and processes in an
ecosystem that reaches outside the walls of the enterprise.
The design principles that aid building such collaborative systems must be broader than the criteria for what constitutes a
well-designed service. IBM believes that the following SOA
design principles are fundamental to building Systems of
Interaction.3

Service orientation at the core. Think about business

solutions in terms of interacting processes and services.
Process integrity at internet scale. Ensure the integrity of
interactions and information across time and location.
Integration with enterprise capabilities and back-end
systems. Provide a unified experience across channels and
systems, using existing capabilities to drive new innovative
processes.
A basis in industry standards. A single player or vendor
cannot dictate protocols or information standards.
Platform for a growing ecosystem. As the business ecosystem grows beyond the walls of the enterprise, so does the
ecosystem that delivers and manages business solutions.

This last design principle is what the excitement regarding web

APIs is all about; growing the development ecosystem beyond
the enterprise as a means for extended business outreach.

Growing the ecosystem beyond the

enterprise
When mobile, social, cloud and big data analytics are joined, a
set of key questions arise about the enterprise business model
and the solutions that support it, including:

Where do transactions happen? They can happen any

where and any time, which is the essence of mobile and cloud.
Who can inf luence your business? Your business can be
influenced by any one that publishes an opinion, positive or
negative, which is the impact of social media.
Who can access your information? Your information can be
accessed by any one that you can legally provide it to, whether
in exchange for money, influence or improved relationships.
Applying big data analytics to vast amounts of available
information sources helps you provide differentiated value and
insight, particularly in the context of the Internet of Things.
What is an application? It is any piece of software that
provides value, which includes mobile apps, software embedded in appliances or cars, cloud services and so on.
Who is your developer? She can be any one that builds
business solutions using your information or services. In an
open ecosystem, often the developer is a person who is not
employed by your own enterprise.

Collectively, these statements represent a profound change not

only in how solutions are delivered but also in what the business
needs you to deliver.

IBM Software

A popular online store and a popular social networking service,

while adopting different business models, are both examples of
early adopters of a computing model that is open by design,
where the product is based on APIs and services projected into
an extended ecosystem. Without its open merchant platform,
the online store would not be the one stop shop for all kinds of
goods and most likely, this store would not have become one of
the dominant internet retail portals. Without the open interface
to its communication servers, the social networking service could
not have relied on a myriad of smart clients being provided at no

cost by various open source communities and most likely, it

would not have achieved the popularity that it has today. These
two examples represent a trend spanning all industries where
solutions are first and foremost designed for an open ecosystem,
whether those solutions are deployed internally, externally or in
a hybrid fashion. Mobile first and cloud first, two important
concepts from this new age of computing, represent the need to
design for a different experience and environment while still
allowing solutions, where appropriate, to run within the enterprise or through traditional channels.

Channels: Smartphones Tablets Desktops Cars TVs Others

Capabilities for API and service consumers
Composition

App management and DevOps

Industry accelerators

Mobile accelerators

Marketplaces
Social feedback and communities
Internal developers

Business support systems

Internal developers

External developers

Self-service portal: Registration Documentation Sandbox

Capabilities for API and service providers

Main
focus
of 2005
SOA
reference
model

Reference modelAPI and service economy

Security and platform man

Analytics and metering

API & service design & integ

API & service DevOps

Services: Data Processes Applications Cloud & 3rd party integration

Cloud / on-prem / hybrid hosting

API management is the SOA renaissance

To embrace an open ecosystem, deliver APIs as part of a business product and carefully promote and manage your external
business persona, you require more than integration middleware.
The elements of the original 2005 IBM SOA reference model
remain important and are rendered in a compressed form as the
bottom layer of the figure above. Having said that, those elements on their own are not sufficient to address the needs
arising from the API and service economy. While classical SOA
middleware is focused on creating and managing software services, the other three types of capabilities for an API and service
economy platform are the following:

Designing and optimizing a business persona through the

definition and management of easy-to-consume APIs
Providing developer portals and participating in marketplaces
to make potential consumers aware of your APIs and support
onboarding and self-service in a controlled fashion
Making the consumption of APIs as easy as possible, including
supporting uniform hybrid composition spanning a multitude
of providers, environments and technologies

Many of these capabilities are well known in isolation but must

be integrated in new ways. Other elements require fundamental
innovation and a different approach to delivery.

API management as the SOA

renaissance
When innovation is required, you are often tempted to start
with a blank piece of paper yet this time you cannot afford to do
so. While it is true that business models are fundamentally
changing, implementation continues to require robust integration of people, processes and software, only now at a much

grander scale and an even higher speed. SOA and API

Management are inextricably linked and neither is whole without the other. API management delivers the business centricity
and business model that many SOA initiatives have historically
lacked. SOA delivers the experience and engineering discipline
that drives more effective API design and provides robust integration to systems of record. All APIs are services but not all
APIs are well-designed services.
IBM believes that API management is the SOA renaissance. Far
from being an alternative to SOA, API management, in fact,
builds upon and extends the reach of the fundamental principles
of SOA. But if API management is an extension of SOA, then
why do people say things like SOA is yesterdays news, APIs are
the future or API management is completely different from
SOA and SOA will bog you down? From IBMs perspective,
such statements are a classical case of myth making in the wake
of a new industry trend. Rarely is a new concept so disruptive
that it does not build on the principles and technologies that
came before it. With that in mind, consider below some important examples of the myths about SOA and API management.
Myth: API management is completely different from SOA and
SOA will bog you down.
At a technical level, more similarities than differences exist
between API management and SOA. In fact, at the foundation
of an effective API is a well-designed service. Some of the most
important parts of an API are its interface, the business task that
it represents and the associated business contract, which are all
key elements of a service definition.

IBM Software

Myth: SOAP is dead, APIs are always REST

It is true that most modern APIs are based on REST/JSON
rather than SOAP. However, the use of REST/JSON rather
than SOAP does not mean that there is no use for the formalism
of SOAP; merely that such formalism is not necessary for
human-based consumption of APIs and services. In machine-tomachine communication or when using formalized composition
tools, SOAP still has plenty of uses. Choose the right binding for
the purpose; there are good reasons why the industry has
invented more than one option.
Myth: API management is SOA governance re-branded
While there is some truth to this statement, in its totality it is a
myth as well. APIs have product nature and therefore, APIs must
be managed as products. SOA governance is less concerned with
productization of assets than it is concerned with determining
and governing the process of creating an effective portfolio of
reusable assets in the first place. In that fashion, API management and classical SOA governance are highly synergistic.
Myth: No governance is needed with API management, which
allows companies to innovate faster
Lack of governance might allow you to create API products
faster but it also makes you lose control a lot faster . APIs that
make up your companys external persona are an important part
of your product portfolio and must be managed as such with
clear ownership and responsibilities. That said, governance
should be lighter for an API than for the typical lifecycle of a
back-end software service.
Myth: APIs are not versioned
That is like saying that the sun does not shine. Obviously, disruptive changes do happen and when they do, you must handle
them appropriately. Claiming that you do not need versioning
merely means that you are making consumers of an API figure

out the versioning themselves. With that said, because APIs in

many ways are business products, you should reduce version
churn by only defining and publishing a new official version
when an update is not backwards compatible. Versioning is still
needed but you must version wisely.

Conclusion
Bottom line, API management is a natural extension of SOA.
API management appropriately refocuses on the business aspects
of human and software interactions. While business centricity
was always part and parcel of the idea behind SOA, the business
angle in practice often got lost in technology. The advent of
APIs enables you to separate the business concerns of making an
API a successful product from the IT concerns of providing the
service that implements the API. The journey from IT-centric
web services to business-centric API management is not only
appropriate but also necessary for enterprises that build Systems
of Interaction extending beyond their enterprise walls.
Effective API management solutions provide you with not only
the ability to define an API but also more importantly, the ability
to project that API into an ecosystem that the enterprise cannot
effectively reach through its own end user solutions. Therefore,
API management has additional focus on the developer experience and the business model, beyond the portfolio of reusable
service assets.
The business advantage of bringing SOA and API management
together is that this approach provides a deep and robust integration all the way from the Internet of Things to enterprise
back-end systems. Furthermore, the integration is done in a
fashion that can generate new business insight and opportunities
through in-f light combination of historical knowledge and situational context. These are the characteristics that businesses must
look for when establishing their new-age computing platform.

For more information

To learn more about the SOA and API management please contact your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit
the following website: ibm.com/soa

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Copyright IBM Corporation 2013

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December 2013
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1 http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/nexus-of-forces/

2 http://www.opengroup.org/soa/source-book/ontology/

3 For

details download SOA Design Principles for Dummies from

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