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Apigee, which refers to itself as the API company, has launched a new platform to help enterprises monetize their APIs, the Apigee Enterprise – Monetization Services.
Apigee officials said this new offering that makes it easy for customers to maximize the business value and foster rapid growth of their API-based digital initiatives. Apigee Monetization Services delivers enterprise-grade API monetization functionality to support a wide range of business models. This new capability is designed for digital initiatives built on apps, data and APIs.
“The API and developer programs at the heart of mobile strategies are increasingly business critical and provide opportunities to create new revenue streams. Existing financial management solutions are simply not designed to take advantage of new transactional opportunities enabled by apps and APIs,” said Chet Kapoor, Apigee CEO, in a statement. “Apigee Monetization Services is not just about pricing digital assets, but also understanding what to price, monitoring plan performance, and easily adapting to meet optimal monetization terms. It’s the only fully integrated, end-to-end solution for managing the entire monetization process, from purchase to payment.”
Anita Paul, director of API products at Apigee, told eWEEK Apigee Monetization Services empowers non-technical business users to manage the end-to-end process of monetizing digital assets—including creating rate plans, managing limits and notifications, configuring reports and billing documents, and modifying the system to maximize API program value. It offers flexibility to create customized plans or use the “out-of-the-box” plans that cover all revenue models, including fixed and variable fees, revenue sharing and even “freemium” plans.
Paul, who used to work on the enterprise side, said in her former position she would have welcomed an API monetization solution. “One of the biggest problems I had was we had some very inflexible systems and we needed to set plans in all these different models,” she said. “But we’ve automated the process to allow business users to set plans and manage payments.”
Apigee Monetization Services is integrated with the Apigee Enterprise API platform, a platform for creating, managing and measuring digital initiatives built on apps, data and APIs. Through this integration, the entire monetization process—including all communication between providers and developers—is automated, Apigee said.
Among the key features of the service for developers is that performance of developers, packages and plans are constantly monitored in Apigee, enabling API providers to react and adjust plans in real time—testing and refining across a range of scenarios and variables, said Bryan Kirschner, director of Apigee Institute.
In addition, rate plans and changes to plans created in Apigee Monetization Services are automatically published to the developer portal for use by the developer community, and rate plan limits and notifications set in Apigee Monetization Services are automatically reflected in real time in the Apigee Enterprise platform. Also, the API provider is automatically notified when a developer purchases or changes his plan or is reaching plan limits.
Kirschner called Apigee Monetization Services “an enabler” for all types of enterprises. “Some customers are way down the road with APIs and apps, and others are just getting comfortable with the process and are beginning to think about how they can expand their APIs externally.”
Apigee Monetization Services can also be easily integrated with any existing accounting, ERP, sales or other back-end system to coordinate with established business processes, Kirschner said.
“It’s critical that businesses have the freedom to explore all the ways to orchestrate value creation through APIs,” Kapoor said in a statement. “Our monetization capabilities provide the flexibility and agility to allow API providers to quickly determine and execute on the right business strategy for their digital initiatives.”
Apigee Monetization Services is sold as an add-on to Apigee Enterprise, available either in the cloud or on premises. It will be widely available in August.