A plethora of businesses still rely on their developer or IT teams to craft API-based mechanisms for exchanging data between different channels and tracking them in more sophisticated databases. Normally, in B2B interactions, IT teams on both sides abide by the API standards and facilitate data exchange, but they are soon heckled by the sheer volume of data involved and become “locked-in” to the data exchange, and its lack of visibility to business people.
Handling such high volumes with an API-based mechanism involves many hiccups. Complexity, delays, huge capital, and more are some of them. Ultimately, they face hardships while expanding the nature of your business relationship on the fragility of the data exchange’s architecture. Subsequently, agility and collaboration suffer. Further, it impacts data quality and needs skilled IT labor to correct data errors.
Over the past decade, APIs started making headway as an alternative to EDI. Compared to EDI, API, or Application Programming Interface, no doubt, offers greater agility and customization sans as much lock-in to finding out how to make the EDI standards accommodate more modern data exchanges. Rather than choosing the EDI document standards and rules, APIs employed JSON or XML as response formats for communication.
However, the technical debt involved in API is huge. Fact is, whatever technical debt users might avoid with less EDI-tech lock-in is doubled in terms of technical debt as they make efforts to keep with the API versioning that is often highly specific to one trading relationship and more surrounding than just data formatting. The technical debt that companies incur as they embody critical B2B data exchange into literal computer source code inclusive of access methods, security, workflows, data format mitigation, and so on, is huge when compared to typical EDI technology stack which almost always has an architecture that carefully separates access, delivery, tracking, workflows, data formats, and so on.
Plus, it offers low-visibility into the exchange processes that can trigger multiple data quality as well as collaboration issues which, in turn, weakens customer experiences and ROI.
Related White Paper: Reimagine your Customer Data Integration
Most importantly, API-based mechanisms fail to enable business users residing in an organization to implement a new B2B integration connection and empower them to use customer data for decision-making.
Simply put, API-based solutions keep users up all night because:
- It involves a lot of technical debt, especially during API versioning, thereby turning organizations difficult to do business with.
- It provides lower visibility into the data exchange processes that can trigger data quality and collaboration issues which, in turn, weakens CXs and ROI.
- It disempowers business users and poses a lot of burden on IT/ developers to execute complex API coding, upgrade API transaction and execute complex data handling.
Improve API Performance with Self-Service
Adeptia’s self-service – powered customer data integration platform offers a newer and smarter approach. Business users are empowered to integrate customer data without getting involved in thankless and difficult API coding, saving a lot of time and capital. All the people in the value chain can look directly at data streams and customer entities through intuitive screens and dashboards and make data onboarding connections by only pointing and clicking through easy screens. It can be so simple that anyone can be a data integrator, enabling everyone in the organization to delight customers.
With other advancements like machine learning and security protocols in place, non-technical users can easily create data connections faster and drive transactions at the speed of business.
Adpetia can help business users create faster data integrations and amplify API performance.
- It boosts ease of doing business by minimizing technical debt.
- It empowers business users to integrate and exchange data without weeks of API coding.
- It accelerates onboarding of customer data to fast-forward service delivery and revenue generation.