V

viewpoints

DOI:10.1145/2856447 Peter C. Evans and Rahul C. Basole

Economic and
Business Dimensions
Revealing the API Ecosystem
and Enterprise Strategy
via Visual Analytics
Seeking better understanding of digital transformation.

V
A L UA BLE I N SI G H TS CAN be
gained by applying visual
analytic techniques to un-
derstand complex, emerg-
ing ecosystem dynamics
and evolving enterprise strategies.1,2
One such context is the application
programming interface (API) ecosys-
tem. APIs have grown dramatically in
the past five years. These bits of code
act as digital control points that set the
terms for which data and services can
be efficiently shared or “called” over the
Internet.11 There are now over 12,000
IMAGE BY ALICIA KUBISTA /A ND RIJ BORYS ASSOCIAT ES

open APIs available across a wide range

of market sectors, a thirtyfold increase
since 2006.a While the ability to connect
to digital resources using APIs has been
a feature of computing for decades, the
prominence of digital platforms, the
rise of mobile computing, lower cost

a See ProgrammableWeb, http://www.program-

mableweb.com/

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 viewpoints

of data storage, and just the sheer use- Figure 1. Open APIs by top 10 sectors.
fulness of automating how digitally en-
coded information can be made avail- Rank API Category
able and exchanged has helped to spur 1 Tools
2 Financial
faster growth. Some of the most popu- 3 Enterprise
lar APIs handle a staggering number 4 Messaging
5 Social
of calls. For example, Twitter, Google, 6 eCommerce
Facebook, Netflix, AccuWeather, eBay, 7 Mapping
and Sabre all handle over a billion API 8 Science
9 Government
calls per day.4 10 Payments
Firms are finding APIs to be benefi- 0 200 400 600 800 0 200 400 600 0 50 100 150
cial in a variety of ways. The initial pro- Number of APIs Mashup Count Avg. Betweeness Score

vider can use an API as a way to create Source: Authors calculations with data from ProgrammableWeb, 2015
new revenue streams, by offering access
to already existing digital information
through a range of different business approach,9 and sized nodes according API responds to over a million queries
models (including subscription, li- to their influence.6 a month to locate and input recharging
cense, freemium, or pay-as-you-go). For The network analysis reveals inter- facilities and is now moving with other
example, Thomson Reuters, which has esting sectoral differences. The highest providers to build a common payment
an extensive 45 million over-the-coun- concentrations of APIs are primarily system through the Open Charge Point
ter exchange-traded instruments glob- found in software tools, finance, enter- Protocol (OCPP). A growing number
ally, is building out a set of APIs to make prise, messaging, social networking, of local governments have moved to
it easier for other companies to access and e-commerce (see Figure 1), rang- offer APIs to improve the information
this data.3 APIs also make it possible for ing between 400 to over 750 per sector. around public transportation, such as
third parties to build entirely new digi- Mapping, science, government, and the Swiss Public Transport, Toronto
tal applications and services by creating payments are also prominent sectors, Transit Commission, and the BART
“mashups” that integrate existing APIs. each containing between 300 to 400 metro system in San Francisco. As the
More than 6,000 such mashups have open APIs. But a large number of open trend toward smart cities and con-
been created in recent years. APIs does not mean there will neces- nected vehicles grows, transportation-
While open APIs promise to create sarily be a large number of API mash- focused open APIs are only likely to
value, boost productivity, and offer ups. The most active areas for building grow. The Ford Motor Company and
strategic advantages for firms that em- new mashups use social, e-commerce, General Motors have established API
brace their use, they are not deployed and mapping APIs. For example, to programs that allow third-party soft-
evenly across firms or industry sec- date there are 671 mashups built on ware developers to build apps that will
tors. What sectors have attracted the social media APIs, and another 576 enable vehicles to include a wide range
most APIs? And what firms are situated built on top of mapping APIs. Surpris- of “connected car” features ranging
at the core of the API ecosystem and ingly, while there are more than 450 from voice recognition to advanced ve-
which remain at the periphery? open finance APIs available, there are hicle diagnostics.8 Moreover, startups
To better understand the broader only 70 mashups that leverage these like MetroTech Net are building APIs
structure of the API ecosystem, we lev- interfaces. Relatively low ratios of new that publish highly accurate and dy-
eraged a comprehensive curated data- mash-up generation are also found in namic data on traffic patterns retrieved
set of over 11,000 APIs and 6,000 mash- health and payments. Comparing the and analyzed from traffic cameras and
ups, across 329 sectors. We converted average betweenness centrality scores other sensor data. Given its size and
the API data into a mashup network, of APIs in each category, a measure the value of improvements in informa-
where nodes represent APIs and edges of relative network prominence, the tion flows, the transportation segment
represent if two APIs have been used most central sectors to the API network appears destined to move from the pe-
jointly in a mashup. Edges are scaled include social, images, search, and riphery to the core of the API economy.
proportional to the total number of mapping sectors. This is followed by Our visualization also provides in-
mashups: the thicker the line, the more e-commerce, cloud computing, video, sight into variation in API strategies
mashups were created using the corre- and payments. used by firms. Our visual analytic anal-
sponding two APIs. We then computed Although it does not yet rise into ysis revealed that only few traditional
important network properties, includ- the top 10 ranking of API sectors (by firms are active in the open API econo-
ing various centrality measures, to un- count), our analysis reveals transpor- my. For example, few if any major com-
derstand the position, prominence, tation-related APIs are growing rapidly. panies appear in the core component
and influence of APIs in the network. These APIs offer a variety of function- whether they are from banking, insur-
Finally, we visualized this network us- ality. For example, PlugShare’s API ance, pharmaceuticals, food, transpor-
ing a cluster-emphasizing force-direct- enables owners of Teslas and other tation, or energy. Instead, we see the
ed layout algorithm (OpenORD),7 iden- electric cars to locate charging stations API economy is dominated by relative-
tified and colored communities within and to a community of other electric ly recently established digital compa-
this graph using a modularity-based vehicle users. The PlugShare Station nies. Most central to this emerging eco-

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viewpoints

Figure 2. API economy visualized: Amazon.com versus Walmart. be necessary to reclassify Amazon’s in-
dustry peer group in time.
The growth of the API economy,
however, is not without its risks. For
Walmart
several years a battle has been waged
over whether APIs can be copyrighted
or are they exempt and more appro-
Alexa Web Inform
priately subject to the doctrine of
Amazon SNS
Amazon
Amazon
“fair use.” A key attractiveness of APIs
Marketplace
SimpleDB is the ability to copy and repeat the
Amazon Product best bits.10 Another concern is that
Advertising
an API provider can abruptly change
pricing terms or even turn off an API
that has become critical input into
services that others have created. The
degree to which these risks represent
Amazon
Amazon SC2 CloudWatch speed bumps or something more se-
Amazon S3 rious remains to be seen. Meanwhile,
Amazon
Amazon RDS Mechanical Turk investment in APIs is taking place
across a wide range of sectors and
Amazon DynamoDB Amazon Queue Service
companies discover new ways APIs
Amazon Amazon
Flexible Redshift can drive productivity, reduce costs,
and enhance flexibility of their oper-
Companies ations and services. As API networks
Walmart grow richer and more complex, visual
Amazon analytic techniques will provide a
API Clusters
valuable tool for discovering, track-
Social Media Enterprise ing, and sensemaking of the evolu-
Job Search Payments tion of API ecosystems and what it
E-commerce Messaging Services Source: Peter C. Evans and Rahul C. Basole,
with data from ProgrammableWeb,
means for different industries and
Tools/Analytics/Big Data The Center for Global Enterprise, 2015 specific enterprise strategies.

References
1. Basole, R.C. Visual business ecosystem intelligence:
system are companies that have built This is not to say that traditionally Lessons from the field. IEEE Computer Graphics and
businesses around areas such as so- brick-and-mortar retailers do not ac- Applications 5 (May 2014), 26–34.
2. Basole, R.C. et al. Understanding business ecosystem
cial, mapping, search, online payment, tively use API tools and services to sup- dynamics: A data-driven approach. ACM Transactions
image sharing, video, and messaging. port a range of approaches aimed at on Management Information Systems (TMIS) 6, 2
(June 2015), 6.
This includes digital platform compa- optimizing and personalizing device 3. Curtis, J. Thomson Reuters opens sources data APIs for
nies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and screen experiences. In fact, they developers. ITPRO (July 1, 2015); http://bit.ly/1MRWuys
4. DuVander, A. Which APIs are handling billions of
Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Salesforce, and do. Macy’s, for instance, has tapped requests per day. ProgrammableWeb (May 23, 2015).
Twilio, as well as lesser-known compa- Twitter’s Audience Platform to reach 5. Evans, P.C. and Basole, R.C. Decoding the API
Economy with Visual Analytics; http://bit.ly/1Us6bWU
nies like Quova, Anedot, and Zapier. more customers and boost sales. How- 6. Freeman, L.C. A set of measures of centrality based
The retail sector provides a fascinat- ever, the number of open APIs that Ma- on betweenness. Sociometry 40, 1 (Jan. 1977), 35–41.
7. Martin, S. et al. OpenOrd: An open-source toolbox
ing example of these stark differences.5 cy’s itself has established is very small. for large graph layout. In Society of Photo-Optical
Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE) Conference Series
Consider the position of Amazon.com Among this small number, only one 7868, 5 (Jan. 2011), 4.
and Walmart in the core API ecosys- other mashup has been established. 8. Newcomb, D. Ford, GM open their dashboards to
outside developers. Wired (Jan. 8, 2013).
tem (see Figure 2). Amazon.com has Amazon, by contrast, has a large and 9. Newman, M.E. Modularity and community structure in
had an explicit policy of creating open growing number of open APIs. This networks. In Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences 103, 23 (2006), 8577–8582.
APIs. The results of our visual analysis is particularly true in the e-commerce 10. Samuelson, P. Oracle v. Google: Are APIs
support that. Amazon has over 33 open space where there are now 140 mash- copyrightable? Commun. ACM 55, 11 (Nov. 2012).
11. Tilson, D., Lyytinen, K., and Sørensen, C. Research
APIs, which have been combined with ups built on Amazon APIs. Amazon commentary-digital infrastructures: The missing IS
many other APIs to create more than is also clearly branching out beyond research agenda. Information Systems Research 21, 4
(2010), 748–759.
300 mashups. Walmart, by contrast, e-commerce into areas such as cloud,
has only one API that has yielded only enterprise tools, mapping, messag-
Peter C. Evans ([email protected]) is Vice President,
one mashup. Considering the central- ing, networking, and payments. These The Center for Global Enterprise.
ity scores of Amazon’s APIs compared areas are generally considered fun- Rahul C. Basole ([email protected]) is Associate
to that of Walmart, it is not surpris- damental information infrastructure Professor, School of Interactive Computing and Director,
Tennenbaum Institute at Georgia Institute of Technology,
ing to observe that Amazon sits near services for the emerging Internet of Atlanta, GA.
the core of the API economy whereas Things industry. As a result, it may be
Walmart is more peripheral. important to consider whether it will Copyright held by authors.

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