IBM Product Briefing 

Develop, expose & manage, secure, high-performance APIs for your business

In 2020 – 2021 consumer access to online business has been rising dramatically, this highlights the need for robust, secure & scalable external interfaces for your business. Encouraging Mobile App developers to use your business APIs though an easy-to-use development portal could bring new customers to your business.

API Connect offers an integrated solution to deploy and manage all your API needs, including monetising the use of your APIs to mobile application providers.

Product names relevant to this briefing include IBM Integration, IBM API Connect Enterprise (API-C),  IBM Automation, Responsiv Unity API Gateway.

IBM knowledge centre.

Responsiv Unity

Responsiv and IBM API Connect Enterprise (API-C)

Responsiv can provide the software, full cycle project support, and licence optimisation. We offer fixed price consulting for API build and management initiatives, including PSD2 and other standards compliant projects. 

Business Drivers

API development and deployment needs to happen at the same speed that the business is changing, a new campaign often requires new APIs, a new mobile app launch will definitely require new APIs before the launch. External App developers need access to your APIs as soon as possible to enable a timely launch of their products that use your APIs.

Your security team needs to be confident that any deployed API does not compromise your company or any data held about your customers or staff. Your IT Support people need to be able to monitor and understand what is happening in the API Gateway to ensure all SLAs are being met for your customers.

• Socialise and Engage with API Consumers to drive adoption
• Monetise your API Calls
• Manage the Lifecycle of your APIs
• Secure & Control your APIs with Industry leading API Gateway

API Connect provides the functionality to meet all these business requirements.

Key Capabilities

Secure & Control your APIs with Industry leading API Gateway

• Secure to the core with signed, encrypted gateway image without external software dependencies to minimise risk.
• Proven API security policies at runtime to quickly protect services and data across multi-clouds.
• Performant & scalable architecture to help meet SLAs and improve client user experience.
• Optimised drag & drop built-in policies for security, traffic control & mediation to accelerate time to value.
• Flexible and extensible to align with enterprise requirements and enable quick customisation.

Manage the Lifecycle of your APIs

• Define & Import REST or SOAP APIs to put those assets under governance.
• Package APIs into Products and tailor them to target specific consumer markets.
• Publish and Promote across different environments to align with DevOps practices.
• Manage and Control API Lifecycle and versioning from staging to deprecation to meet corporate governance needs.
• Subscription and Community management to grow go-to-market channels.

Socialise and Engage with API Consumers to drive adoption

• Self-service, branded Portal across multiple API provider lines of businesses within an organisation to socialise APIs.
• Engage with API consumers via community building features: blogs, forums, ratings etc.
• Governance & autonomy to each provider organisation to manage their APIs, products, plans and multiple gateway endpoints independently within their ‘Space’.

Monetise your API Calls

• Modern approach & intuitive user experience providing flexibility to define pricing details.
• Subscription pricing to enable recurring payments, popular in SaaS go-to-market strategies.
• Stripe integration OOTB for smooth user-onboarding and payment collection.
• Analytics, customisable reports for detailed insights into revenue, usage of monetised APIs.
• Offload API usage data to existing enterprise tools to handle customised invoicing processes.

Use Cases

• Banking gateways to manage the Open banking / PSD2 directives.
• Insurance aggregator calls to your systems, where response times are critical.
• Retail stock availability from wholesale warehouses to “just in time ordering” providers.
• Mobile pretty much any mobile app that requires data from a backend system.

Why would you be interested?

If you have any concerns about the reliability, security, performance or manageability of your API infrastructure you should be looking at API Connect. 

If you are concerned about;

• Performance, scalability and monitoring of you APIs.
• Secure and hardened platform single self-contained gateway image without external software dependencies that minimises exposure to security attacks.
• Deploy anywhere & co-locate DataPower API Gateway with backends, on-premises and/or public clouds (ex. AWS, Azure, Google)

Enterprise Architect     

API Connect can be deployed on premise or cloud in virtual or physical formats. It offers a robust & secure proven platform for the exposure and management of APIs

Operations managers & Administrators

API Connect offers a single runtime to expose and protect all your APIs, separate management runtime is used to administer and deploy APIs to the runtime with granular ACLs to control access. The developer portal and main APIs have throughput and time constraints to control the impact of any testing or attempted DOS attacks.