Meeting key business objectives (in the context of a platform strategy) such as increasing market share or profitability in the enterprise’s niche can be achieved by increasing the enterprise’s user base, the user engagement and improving the product mix.
Strategic Objectives
Big data analysis of the large volumes of data being generated in the app economy is key to designing and executing strategies that can help enterprises meet their strategic objectives.
Entities in the API Ecosystem such as end users, apps, developers, API and backend systems are continuously generating streams of data within the API value chain and outside the API value chain. For example, App Users are not only using their apps and APIs but sharing opinions on social media, looking for content on the internet and interacting with products andservices in the physical world. These continuously growing streams of data contain hidden signals that hold the key to meeting the enterprise’s strategic objectives.
Enterprises looking to gain a competitive edge in the app economy have the opportunity to harness the power of big data and contextual analytics to solve three key problems that directly offer increased profitability & market share through higher usage of their products and services and higher user satisfaction.
Understanding End Users
End users drive value in the API value chain. It is critical that the enterprise understand the behavior and actions of their end users and why users act and behave the way they do. It is critical that the enterprise is able to segment their end users by product usage, by value they drive to the bottom line and by how engaged these users are with their products and services.
Offering sticky products and services requires that the enterprise understand the value that end users are looking for in the products and services. Enterprises need to understand their desired profile of the end user. The desired profile is an intersection of the end users who find value in the enterprise’s products and services and the end users that are profitable for the enterprise.
Attracting the Best Developers
Developers are key to building great apps across a diverse use case set. A diverse app set attracts a broader set of end users directly translating to more end users, higher usage and higher profitability for the enterprise. Enterprises do not retain control over the end user experience on apps written by third party developers. This makes it critical for the enterprise to attract, detect, nurture and promote developers and apps that offer the best user experience and the best value for the enterprise.
Attracting the best developers requires enterprises to understand their desired developer profile, their current developer profile and emerging trends in the developer world being promoted and embraced by the “early adopter” developers. The ability to adapt and embrace these emerging developer trends can increase the attractiveness of an enterprise’s platform.
Enterprises need to understand how their developers communicate with them and how and where developers hang out or seek support. The ability to keep a tab on all developer communication avenues, quickly gather areas of dissatisfaction and move to address and quelch any unhappiness can be the difference between retaining the best developers who build the best, most profitable and desirable apps.
Monetizing Data
Understanding the value of an enterprise in eyes of end users, developers, partners and other enterprises is critical for building new and innovative products and services, improving existing products and services and building new business models around data monetization. Every time a request is made for an enterprise’s data, the metadata generated around the context of the request event can offer deep strategic insights into where value is concentrated in an enterprise’s data set.
Understanding and monetizing data requires enterprises to extract and process to build comprehensive accounting mechanisms across all data access mechanisms enabled through APIs, Apps and other data transfer mechanisms. Enterprises need to be able to understand the end user intent and request type metadata to determine the highest value data and data enabled use cases.
Conclusion
The App economy fueled by the shifting enterprise edge is and is expected to produce increasingly diverse and disparate streams of data that provide a wealth of opportunity for enterprises to apply big data and contextual analytical principles to solving the key problems in the app economy.
An enterprise’s competitive edge depends on their ability to uncover deep insights through platforms like Apigee Insights that offer the ability to gather, model, analyze the app economy data, generate insights, act on these insights, observe the change and adjust if necessary andmaking strong progress towards the enterprise’s strategic objectives.