With a new year upon us, it’s a fitting time to look at the API (application programming interface) market and how it’s likely to change in 2025. One prediction that’s easy to make: APIs, which are already so important, carrying about 83% of all internet traffic, will become even more important and strategic in 2025.
Numbers tell the story. In the report Hype Cycle for APIs, 2024, Gartner® notes that 82% of survey respondents reported that their organizations were using APIs internally and 71% were also using APIs provided by third parties such as SaaS vendors or generative AI companies such as OpenAI.
AI Depends on APIs
Speaking of generative AI, Gartner noted that large language models (LLMs) and AI agents are becoming major consumers of APIs. At the same time, developers are increasingly relying on AI-powered coding assistants and other tools to develop APIs.
It’s obvious that the growth of AI and APIs are linked. AI depends on data, and the way AI solutions access data is almost always through APIs. So, to take advantage of AI — which has become a top-down directive in the majority of organizations — IT teams need to get their API houses in order. They need to be able to discover, manage, and secure APIs for any data that might support any of their AI initiatives.
That’s a challenge, because most organizations have “shadow APIs” that aren’t under the control and watchful eye of the IT department. Valuable data and APIs might be lurking on the network, somewhere. For now, they’re uncataloged and possibly unsecured — a situation commonly known as “API sprawl.”
Not surprisingly, the requirements for API discovery, governance, and security are reflected in the Hype Cycle for APIs. On the steep slope of rising expectations, you’ll find Federated API Gateways, which provide a way to manage APIs at scale across an organization.
This is where we believe the Boomi API Control Plane fits in, providing an enterprise-scale solution for managing API gateways from multiple vendors in a single, federated control environment. By centralizing visibility and control over APIs, the API Control Plane makes API discovery, management, and governance much easier and more straightforward than ever before.
And on that same curve, you’ll find API Consumption by Generative AI.
High Expectations for API Products
Once organizations have API sprawl under control, they can more easily address another topic on the Hype Cycle.
API products are APIs packaged, documented, and supported as commercial-grade products, whether for external or internal use. API products enable organization to make the most of the APIs they’ve developed.
To manage and produce API products effectively, it pays to centralize API discovery and governance, and to ensure that APIs can be fully documented and versioned, perhaps by using new tools available with generative AI.
We believe the position of API products near the top of the Hype Cycle shows the high expectations organizations today have for this use of APIs. It’s important for organizations to invest in the right tools for building, managing, scaling, and securing API products quickly and efficiently.
Industry Solutions vs. Essential API Requirements
The Hype Cycle also highlights the proliferation of API solutions for specific industries, such as:
- API Marketplaces and Portals in Supply Chain Planning (SCP) (low but rising on the curve of rising expectations)
- Open APIs in Insurance (high up on the curve of rising expectations)
- Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) APIs (near the peak of rising expectations)
- Financial Data APIs (just past the peak)
- API Management for Peak (slipping down the peak and entering the trough of disillusionment)
- API Marketplaces in Banking (near the bottom of the trough of disillusionment)
These solutions can be helpful, because they provide a jump-start for organizations working in a specific industry to take advantage of the business value that API protocols associated with that industry provide. That said, none of these industry-specific offerings remove the need for broader API capabilities that include:
- Streamlining API development
- Discovering, managing, and securing APIs
- Running APIs at enterprise scale to meet requirements for high throughput, low latency, and high reliability
If APIs really are the critical interfaces for everything from AI to banking to healthcare, then investing in tools for managing every phase of an API lifecycle becomes a business imperative. And that includes ensuring that an organization can run the APIs it depends on at scale as adoption of all the technologies that depend on APIs — including AI and event-driven architectures (EDA) for ecommerce and other applications — increase.
Supporting Both EDA and Traditional APIs in a Single API Environment
And here’s another API requirement based on changing trends. As more organizations adopt EDA and protocols like Kafka, they need to set up API gateways to manage event-driven APIs.
But that shouldn’t force organizations to double their API infrastructure, deploying one set of gateways and federated management tools for event-driven traffic and another set of gateways and tools for traditional request-response traffic. Ideally, API gateways, API management platforms, and federated API management controls should all be able to support both types of traffic in the same solution. That way, API practitioners in organizations gain a truly comprehensive way of managing APIs, even as API technologies evolve or multiply to meet changing business needs.
The Big Picture on API Management
Regardless of which technologies are rising or falling, business requirements should be the ultimate driver of API strategies. How can companies best use any of the technologies anywhere on the Hype Cycle to deliver better customer engagements, improve operational efficiency, keep data secure and compliant, and support other organizational goals?
A good first step is remembering that APIs don’t exist in isolation. They work in tandem with other IT capabilities, including
- Master data management (MDM) to ensure that APIs are working with golden records whenever possible
- Integration pipelines built at higher levels of abstraction
- Workflow automation tools, so API data can be easily incorporated in time-saving automations
- EDI management for managing supply chains and partner networks
- AI orchestration tools for managing API-powered AI tools
- AI agents, which will soon number in the hundreds or even thousands on organizations’ networks — and that rely on APIs to get the data they need for task automation
Given all these dependencies, we believe it makes sense to look for API management solutions that work as part of larger integration and automation platforms like the Boomi Enterprise Platform. That way, no matter what part of the Hype Cycle you’re investing in, you’re working with a complete set of capabilities, minimizing the number of vendors and independent products you need to deploy, manage, and learn.
Read the full Gartner report, “Hype Cycle for APIs, 2024.”
Learn more about Boomi API Management here.
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Source: Gartner, Hype Cycle for APIs, 2024, Mark O’Neill, John Santoro, 2 July 2024 (revised 10 July 2024).
GARTNER is a registered trademark and the service mark of Gartner, Inc., and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. HYPE CYCLE is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.