According to Postman’s 2024 State of the API report, 74% of respondents followed the API-first approach in 2024, compared to 66% last year. “APIs are no longer an afterthought but the foundation of development, with between 26 and 50 APIs powering the average application,” Postman wrote in the report. 

The benefits of this strategy include faster API production and faster recovery from failures. This year, 63% of respondents were able to produce an API within one week (up from 47% last year). Additionally, organizations following this approach can typically recover from API failures in under an hour. 

“By prioritizing API design, governance, and security, teams can unlock new opportunities, deliver APIs faster, and ensure their APIs are protected and optimized for the future,” Postman said.

While there are many benefits to API-first, it doesn’t entirely eliminate the challenges API developers face, such as poor documentation and lack of proper collaboration. 

Thirty-nine percent of respondents claim inconsistent documentation is the biggest roadblock to API development. Forty-four percent read through source code to understand their APIs, but over half collaborate with people who don’t understand the code, like product managers, quality assurance, and designers. Forty-three percent also struggle with getting information from other developers who may be working asynchronously in different time zones. 

The report also found that one third of respondents are using multiple gateways for their APIs, signaling that “the traditional single-gateway model is becoming obsolete.”

Another positive finding is that 62% of respondents are generating income from their APIs, and 33% report that APIs make up over 50% of their total revenue. 

“APIs are no longer just technical enablers—they are revenue-generating products … This signals the rise of the API-as-a-product model, where APIs are designed, developed, and marketed as strategic assets,” the report stated. 

And finally AI is resulting in increased API usage as well, with AI-related traffic on Postman’s platform increasing by 73% in the last year. Companies are now having to create APIs not just for humans, but for interfacing with AI systems as well. 

“The age of AI is powered by APIs. The rapid adoption of chatbots like ChatGPT has proven that AI bots are going to advance the state of human-computer interaction. Until now, we have primarily been designing APIs for humans, but designing APIs for machines will become an increasingly important area… and AI alone won’t boost productivity—you need quality APIs to stay ahead in modern software,” the report concluded. 

For its survey, Postman surveyed more than 5,600 developers and API professionals, and made observations based on the activity of the 35 million+ users on its platform. 

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Onymos DocKnow eliminates the need for time-intensive and error-prone manual data processing by using enhanced optical character recognition (OCR) to extract information from both structured and unstructured data. This includes printed and handwritten text, numbers, dates, checkboxes, barcodes, QR codes, and more from any document, including personal identification, intake forms, and health and immunization records. DocKnow can also be easily integrated with any third-party back-end information management system – such as Salesforce, AWS, Azure, and Google – or health record system.

In this latest version, DocKnow is strengthened by:

• A new customer-specific LLM API: This new API enables enterprises to train their own LLMs using their specific data, resulting in more accurate and domain-specific document processing. For instance, DocKnow reliably and instantly identifies inconsistent data across hundreds of pages.
• A new, helpful AI assistant: “Doc,” the Onymos AI agent, enables document processing teams – which could include healthcare professionals, legal teams, university registrars, and more – to search through specific documents and hundreds of pages for immediate access to particular information and records.
• An upgraded, customizable user interface (UI): The new, simple UI includes bounding boxes, automatic zoom-in/zoom-out, image enhancement, and skew correction, which dramatically improves readability for human reviewers. It allows full customization to match an enterprise’s brand, required functionality, and back-end systems. This gives enterprise software engineering and IT teams the ability to modify the component to meet their specific needs as if they had built it from the ground up themselves.

“We understand that many enterprises struggle with time-consuming and error-prone processes like document entry, validation, and retrieval, whether it’s for patient care, student registration, or case file review. While these enterprises have started integrating AI tools powered by LLMs like ChatGPT to help with these activities, they often encounter hallucinations and outdated training data issues,” shared Shiva Nathan, Founder and CEO of Onymos. “Our enhanced DocKnow addresses these challenges by streamlining document processing and empowering enterprises to train their own LLM models tailored to their specific needs, all while ensuring privacy and security.”

As with all Onymos software components, DocKnow is designed with a no-data architecture. This means that all data passing through the solution and used to train the LLM remains securely with the enterprise using the API – no bit or byte of data flows through any Onymos systems or clouds.

For more information on Onymos and DocKnow, visit onymos.com. You can also learn more about Onymos’ no-data architecture by downloading the white paper here.

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The latest updates to Kong Konnect help companies further prepare their API infrastructure to handle AI use cases.

“There is no AI without APIs, and the latest version of Kong Konnect delivers the essential infrastructure for both. We aim to give businesses the tools to manage and scale their API traffic securely, helping drive innovation faster than ever before,” said Augusto Marietti, CEO and co-founder of Kong Inc. “Kong Konnect provides a unified API platform for building, running and governing GenAI applications.”

This update includes Konnect Service Catalog, which provides a single source of truth for APIs and services, which helps companies manage shadow APIs by allowing them to get rid of undiscovered or unused APIs. The Service Catalog also features a Scorecard that assesses how compliance a service is with defined criteria. 

Konnect Dedicated Cloud Gateways are also now available on Azure and new AWS regions. According to the company, this added availability enables organizations to deploy and manage their APIs across multiple clouds and maintain enterprise-grade SLAs. 

Kong Insomnia 10, which is an API design and testing tool, adds unlimited collection runs, AI Runner for developing GenAI apps, and Invite Control, which ensures that API assets can only be accessed by authorized users.

Other features in this release of Kong Konnect include Serverless Gateways, a centralized and cloud-based repository for managing API configurations, and advanced API and AI analytics. 

The update also introduces versions 3.8 of both Kong Gateway and Kong AI Gateway. Kong Gateway 3.8 adds Incremental Configuration Updates, which significantly reduces memory and CPU usage, and enhanced OpenTelemetry support. 

Kong AI Gateway 3.8 adds several semantic reasoning capabilities, including Semantic Caching, which recognizes when different prompts represent the same question, resulting in faster response times. For instance, “how long does it take to cook pasta?” and “how long does it take to cook spaghetti?” would be responded to with the same cached response. 

According to the company, the ability to reply with cached responses cuts down on processing times and reduces computational overhead.

Another new feature in this update is Semantic Prompt Guard, which enables AI Gateway to understand the “essence” of a request and block inappropriate prompts. Normally, those prompts are sorted out by identifying specific keywords, and this feature eliminates the need for that. 

The 3.8 release also introduces Semantic Routing, which selects the most relevant LLM based on a developer’s requirements.

“Kong AI Gateway 3.8 is a significant step forward in enabling organizations to fully harness the power of AI,” said Marco Palladino, co-founder and CTO of Kong. “By introducing Semantic Intelligence into our AI Gateway, we are addressing the most pressing challenges faced by enterprises leveraging GenAI today — speed, cost and security — while dramatically improving the developer experience.”

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In enterprise software marketplaces, each participant vendor contributes specialized expertise, functionality, and scale that are essential to building a complete solution for end users—assuming of course, that no single monolithic vendor would as efficiently meet customer needs.

Before software marketplaces, end users would buy software built specifically for their own vertical, such as ‘healthcare clinic management’ or ‘point of sale terminal system’ — or hire a consultant to customize a bespoke solution, since most enterprises didn’t have a deep enough development bench to do it themselves.

Development partners are precious

Consumer software marketplaces are well known, because they live on our smartphones: Apple App Store and Google Play have the markets cornered for their OS users.

These closed economies hit app developers with a 30 percent commission on each transaction, whether for purchasing the app, or even in-app transactions such as game tokens and add-ons. Developers who don’t want to pay the toll simply won’t have their apps listed.

Needless to say, publishers don’t like the arrangement. Epic Games vs. Apple are still in court today after the popular Fortnite game got kicked off the App Store for having its own internal payment system. European Union regulators are now looking at breaking up such monopolies.

In an enterprise software marketplace, application partners are highly valued, because no vendor’s system is an island unto itself. Encouraging a developer ecosystem creates more choices for end customers, who need to add new functionality that integrates with existing systems.

Vendors now get exposure to the world’s largest cloud services market at a low cost ranging from 1.5% to 3% depending on average sales volume. Even if vendors on the AWS marketplace offer functionality that overlaps with AWS alternatives, that’s fine, because AWS still sells more cloud infrastructure either way.

Across the pond, the Atlassian Marketplace generated more than $500M in annual sales by 2022 for their partner developers. Because Atlassian didn’t impose an extreme tax, they were able to bring together a strong set of vendors building add-on software specifically customized for their suite of tools such as Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket.

The wall of modules and integrations

Most enterprise software marketplaces started out as gadget collections. They are not well-planned, arising out of a necessity to provide adapters to the most likely external systems and core systems in play within the end user’s IT environment.

Back in the turn of the century, I designed B2B marketplaces, most of which failed alongside companies like Pets.com in the dot-bomb implosion. Enterprises with tight IT budgets started to expect vendors to include SDKs and integration modules so they could hook up their existing software packages for free.

Salesforce led the way with a marketplace of add-on services to its core CRM platform. Later, we saw the rise of major business process automation, analytics and low-code app design vendors all offering a gadget wall of partner integrations in their own marketplaces.

Even citizen developers were starting to get in on the game, building solutions from a storefront of LEGO-like vendor pieces with snap-to-fit integration ease.

The rise of API, open source and AI

The widespread adoption of SaaS software and cloud services led us to an API-driven consumption model, which changes the game. Instead of building custom integration models for each platform, vendors publish an API spec, allowing developers to build services that connect to it.

Soon, walls of custom integration widgets gave way to API marketplaces, and a surrounding host of related devtest, management, identity and orchestration apps to govern their use.

Open source software underwent its own revolution, with downloadable packages on npm and API integration code in SwaggerHub and git repositories. Open source marketplaces allow developers to contribute innovative efforts to the community in order to benefit development practices as a whole.

GenAI chatbots and image generators are all the rage today, but AI models are even better at speaking the language of API connections than mastering the complex subtleties of human conversation. AIs can act as integration platforms, allowing even non-technical workers to call on a vast array of services, including other AI models behind their own APIs, with natural language queries.

The Intellyx Take

I could go on forever about the subtleties of software marketplace design and economics, which would be outside the scope of this column. 

For instance, I could talk about intra-enterprise marketplaces that allow IT departments to provision employees and provide platform engineering services to developers, with interdepartmental accounting of the value delivered against budget allocations. But enough of that.

As software marketplaces expand to meet future enterprise needs, the most successful ones will hold their vendor communities close, rather than abandon developers or suddenly game the rules against end customers.

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It features a minimalistic UI design with customizable theming, such as a distraction-free mode. 

Hoppscotch can be used as a cloud-hosted web app, a self-hosted desktop app, or run through the command line. 

One of the key components of Hoppscotch is Collections, which help keep API requests organized. Collections are stored in Workspaces, which can be either personal or for team use, and users can create an unlimited number of workspaces. 

Collaboration features enable teams to design, develop, and test API together. The tool allows for an unlimited number of teams, shared collections, and team members to be created, and also offers role-based access control and cloud sync.

Other key features include a Proxy Mode, data synchronization across devices, the ability to create post-request tests, bulk edit, and more. 

The project currently has over 60K stars on GitHub and was a trending project this week. The most recent release was in June, and it added features like the ability to connect the Hoppscotch CLI to an API client, the ability to add client certificates on the desktop app, and custom banners so that admins can share important announcements with the team. 

Read about other recent Open-Source Projects of the Week:

• • DevPod
  • GraphRAG
  • Theia IDE

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This new offering utilizes technology gained from Boomi’s recent acquisition of the federated API management company APIIDA. 

According to Boomi, organizations can sometimes have “shadow APIs,” which are APIs that exist outside of the purview of IT. By allowing shadow APIs to be discovered from a central location, IT will gain more control over their API landscape and increase API consumption throughout the organization. 

The Boomi API Control Plane also provides a consistent developer experience, collects data on API performance and usage, and enables companies to extend the value of their existing on-premises and cloud investments.

And finally, because it is a centralized platform, companies can improve their API governance. They can use it to ensure that policies are consistent across platforms, reduce the risk of data breaches, and streamline security audits.

“APIs are the backbone of modern digital transformation, yet managing them across various platforms remains a significant challenge for many organizations. Unlike other APIM vendors, Boomi provides a federated API management approach that is truly vendor-independent, enabling organizations to utilize existing on-premises and cloud API runtimes effectively while addressing API sprawl,” said Ed Macosky, chief product and technology officer at Boomi. “With the Boomi API Control Plane, we are setting a new standard for API management by offering an integrated, holistic solution that simplifies operations, strengthens governance, and accelerates innovation.”

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According to the company, businesses today are often managing tens of thousands of APIs and different teams tend to use different API gateways as well. This leads to API sprawl and makes governance difficult.

With Federated API Management, they will now be able to manage, secure, and publish APIs from a central location, regardless of which API gateway they are using.

It offers the ability to discover the APIs in use across the organization, import those APIs into a single control and management layer, and then publish them into a Developer Portal for self-service discovery, documentation, and subscription management. 

“We built federated API management because we know that various teams across a given organization leverage myriad tools to manage their APIs,” said Rory Blundell, CEO of Gravitee. “Even if a team isn’t using Gravitee as their API Gateway, they can still take advantage of having a central source of truth for visibility, subscription control, governance, and more.”

The company will be demoing this new solution at its virtual event Gravitee Edge 2024 this week.

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“An API should be built with its user in mind. Users need to know what an API is and how it works. If they can’t do that, they waste a lot of time looking for the information, struggling to make APIs work. And developers aren’t the only ones who need to understand them; they need to be product- and QA-friendly as well. LEGO wouldn’t sell a LEGO castle set without instructions on how to put it all together. The same goes for APIs. Dev teams need to collaborate on APIs, just as much as they need to collaborate on code,” Abhinav Asthana, co-founder and CEO of Postman, wrote in a blog post. 

With the release of Postman v11, API changes are now shown in the workspace updates feed, rather than being dispersed across various communication channels. API consumers that “watch” that workspace will be notified about the update, with an alert that includes a summary of the changes and a way to navigate to the change. Users will also be able to comment or react to the update. 

A comment mode has also been added to Postman Collections, which is a self-service interface for finding information about APIs. Developers can now highlight text and add a comment to it and can mention specific people in the comment. Others can also respond to these comments and create conversation threads to organize thoughts. 

Partner Workspaces, now generally available for Professional and Enterprise plans, are access-controlled workspaces where API developers can collaborate on APIs with external partners. Postman also introduced the ability to publish content to multiple partners at once as well. 

“When companies work with lots of partners, they maintain multiple workspaces with nearly the same content in each one to ensure isolation between partners. This can become a lot of juggling. To resolve this burden, we’re introducing multi-partner mode so that you can publish Postman Collections to multiple external partners. The partner cannot see other partners’ activity in their workspace; they will see only your team members. This provides a sandbox where customers and partners can evaluate and consume your APIs by sending successful requests quickly,” Asthana wrote. 

Postman v11 introduces the Package Library, which allows code to be reused multiple times across API requests. Packages contain blocks of business logic or code, and to reuse them, developers just reference that package in the places that need to reuse that code. 

Other collaboration updates include the general availability of the VS Code extension, workspace themes, a verification option in the Postman Public API Network, and more.

Additionally, the company’s AI assistant Postbot is now generally available. First introduced last May, Postbot can help write better tests for APIs, generate API documentation, accelerate debugging, visualize API responses, and more.   

“Whether organizations realize it or not, APIs are the hands and legs that power AI’s ‘thinking.’ Those that don’t prioritize their API design strategy now to prepare for an AI-driven future will be left behind,” said Asthana. “The AI battle will be won by improving APIs. Postman’s latest features will empower even the largest organizations to capitalize on the productivity benefits of AI by easing collaboration and communication around APIs, both internally and with external partners. We look forward to seeing the innovation that results.”

A full list of updates can be found in Postman’s release blog post. 

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The WSO2 API Manager control plane was updated to now be able to manage both itself and WSO2 APK. This allows WSO2 APK APIs to benefit from the API Manager’s capabilities and the Developer Portal and Marketplace.

According to the company, benefits include a more streamlined development process, a unified platform for building comprehensive API strategies, and the ability to deploy large numbers of APIs in a scalable way. 

The control plane also gives both platforms access to the WSO2 AI Developer Assistant, providing new features like AI-based search functionality in the Developer Portal and AI-based API testing. 

WSO2 APK also added support for the GraphQL query language to make it easier for developers to request data from their own services. 

The company also introduced a VS Code extension for the WSO2 Micro Integrator, which is an integration platform for connecting different applications. The extension will be available as a developer preview on May 7th. 

The new extension also provides access to the MI Copilot, which allows developers to describe their integration in natural language and then receive recommended configurations. 

“With our new AI-based assistants, unified control plane for WSO2 API Manager and WSO2 APK, and WSO2 Micro Integrator for VS Code extension, we are enhancing these developers’ experiences by offering a more user-friendly, productive, and future-proof environment that aligns with their evolving needs,” said Christopher Davey, vice president and general manager of WSO2’s API & integration software business unit.

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According to the company, Stoplight helps simplify the API development process by providing an intuitive interface for design. This makes API design accessible to non-technical users and streamlines the process for technical users.

“SmartBear’s mission is to empower customers with the solutions and capabilities they need to drive quality and efficiency across development teams,” said Sean Butler, vice president of product management at SmartBear. “Integrating Stoplight’s advanced API design features into SwaggerHub highlights this commitment to enhance the API development lifecycle, particularly critical now with the onslaught of AI-related APIs. Customers can expect multiple benefits, including a seamless developer experience from API design to deployment,” said Sean Butler, vice president of product management at SmartBear. 

This follows the platform’s recent integration with the API style guide enforcer Spectral, which provided API authors with new features to help ensure API quality, such as advanced linting, style guide enforcement, and a user-friendly design interface. In addition to improving overall API quality, these features also help ensure a consistent API portfolio and reduce potential errors. 

Later this year the company also plans to incorporate Prism into SwaggerHub, which will allow developers to create mock servers based on their API definitions.

Additionally, SmartBear revealed its intention to reorganize its product portfolio of over 20 solutions into three categories: API Hub, Test Hub, and Insight Hub.  

“As SmartBear realigns its product offerings into intuitive solution hubs, the integration of Stoplight’s tools into SwaggerHub exemplifies our dedication to solving the real-world challenges faced by our customers. The journey towards improved API design, flexible documentation, and reliable APIs is a collaborative effort. We are committed to providing the tools and support needed to navigate this journey successfully,” SmartBear wrote in a blog post. 

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