MetLife’s Enterprise Integration Architect, Venkatesh (Venky) Ravlrala, discusses how to successfully find a good API.
Depending on the business objectives of the company and the organization, there are some companies which totally rely on monetizing their APIs, meaning API is their money-making source, but for companies like Met Life, that may not be the one, but for us, most bang for buck comes from making easier for the application development or exposing our systems and the quotes and to the third party people who can actually use the APIs to develop application portals and market indirectly our product. That’s how we measure the success of the APIs.
For us, the most measurement and mostly we use, I would say the most bang for buck comes from actually internal use of the API system. Within IT, how do we make spital market feasible? How do I make development life cycle shadow and create applications and deploy, create once and deploy many places like we have a global presence today. How do I create an application that is created in the USA and take most of it and deploy in Poland or Australia and other regions where we want to market our product. That is more of internal use within the Met Life, but there is also an external use of APIs where we can actually give out, expose our APIs so that we can be confident in the market so other people can use our quotes engine for example, to compare the quotes and market our products.
The complete interview is available to Full Members.