APIs are the building blocks of today’s digital economy. Businesses are using them to fuel innovation between departments and to share company data and content with customers or partners at scale. They’re also using APIs to drive new revenue streams and to enable cross-enterprise agility. Although more organizations are building APIs with the goal of driving more value from their digital assets, many of those companies have trouble managing their APIs effectively, especially at scale. Red Hat brings order to API chaos so software teams can spend more time creating tangible business value.

“You can’t just create an API and think you’re done with it,” said Sameer Parulkar, product marketing manager, Enterprise Middleware, at Red Hat, Inc. “You may create an API for a particular purpose today, but what about when requirements change tomorrow? How will you manage and secure that API? You need a scalable, enterprise-class way of doing all that.”

(Related: Learn more about winning in the API economy)

Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open-source enterprise IT solutions, provides the platforms and tools organizations need to succeed in the API economy.

Manage and Secure APIs
Managing and securing APIs at scale requires a sound platform capable of providing caching, fault tolerance, traffic routing and load balancing. Red Hat 3scale API Management Platform scales to billions of API calls, and its distributed architecture ensures no single point of failure.

3scale also provides enterprise-class API access control and security. With it, companies are able to provide different levels of access to different types of users. They are also able to control how different applications interact with a particular API. 3scale’s powerful API access, policy and traffic controls make it easy to authenticate traffic, restrict by policy, protect back-end services, impose rate limits, and create access tiers. It also has the analytics developers need to monitor trends and peak usage times. The analytics also help developers better understand which applications generate the most traffic, which APIs are most popular, and which APIs or endpoints are used the least.

Businesses that want to create new revenue streams from their APIs can use 3scale’s platform to set pricing rules, invoice customers, and collect payments.

Enable Real-Time Integration
An enterprise’s information is spread across multiple applications and processes, which makes APIs complex and difficult to manage. To address the problem, organizations need an effective means of integrating applications, data, and devices within and beyond the enterprise. Progressive companies choose Red Hat JBoss Fuse because it enables rapid integration across extended enterprises on-premise or in the cloud—deploy integrations where needed. “Today’s APIs use multiple information sources, so organizations need a way to connect those information sources together in a modular way,” said Parulkar. “Red Hat JBoss Fuse is a robust, flexible, and easy-to-use platform for integrating applications, data services and devices. It uses popular open source technologies like Apache Camel to provide transformation, routing, and protocol-matching service.”

Red Hat JBoss Fuse also includes Red Hat JBoss A-MQ, a high-performance, reliable messaging platform based on Apache ActiveMQ. Its integration capabilities eliminate manual touch points, automate processes, and connect enterprise assets for improved efficiency. It also includes the real-time messaging capabilities agile businesses require.

Outmaneuver Your Competition
As companies move to microservices architectures, they need the ability to create and connect an API in an agile, continuous fashion. To achieve that, they need a platform that supports the creation of the API as well as its deployment and redeployment. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is a comprehensive enterprise-grade application development and hosting platform that automates tedious management tasks so developers can spend more time building apps that align with business goals.

Red Hat OpenShift also facilitates DevOps by enabling development and operations to work faster and more efficiently. Using Red Hat OpenShift, many organizations have been able to accelerate application delivery cycles and innovate faster. Like all Red Hat products, OpenShift provides enterprise-grade security and improves the effectiveness of DevOps. The platform enables development teams to develop, deploy, and automate modular, reliable, and serviceable applications across their infrastructure regardless of the application’s architecture.

Notably, OpenShift supports the entire application development process in one, consistent solution that is capable of spanning multiple infrastructure footprints. It integrates all of the architecture, processes, platforms and services needed to empower development and operations teams. Finally, businesses can create ideal cloud computing services tailored to applications, integration, or mobile.

Win in the API Economy
Mobile, social computing, and the cloud require organizations to integrate flexible software into the very fabric of what they do. To succeed, the APIs they build must be able to access core systems and resources that may have become information silos. By exposing data, business processes, services and resources through APIs, companies are in a better position to improve mobile experiences, grow their ecosystem, expand their reach, power new business models and catalyze internal innovation.

“APIs are essential for organizations that want to create customer and partner ecosystems that enable higher-level services and revenue opportunities,” said Parulkar. “You need a next-generation platform that enables you to do all of that.”

Learn more at www.redhat.com.