The value of APIs
As you can imagine from the first section of this chapter, APIs can apply to any company or industry that needs to provide data to its customers or partners. Whether it’s an e-commerce company surfacing real-time inventory data, an airline providing real-time visibility into seat availability for its flights, or an academic institution that is making data available to researchers worldwide – APIs can be a valuable component of building for scale and automation.
The human approach to retrieving data can be very time-consuming and prone to human error. For example, let’s say the sales team would like to get a sense of the revenue being driven by a product catalog for the fiscal year. Historically, this request would have to be submitted to a business analyst or operations team member who would then have to figure out how to collect all of the data. The sales team may need information about historical spending and growth month over month or year...
