January 19, 2022
Forbes recently published insight featuring Marshall Van Alstyne, Professor of Information Systems, discussing the positive correlation between growth in market capitalization and the adoption of application programming interfaces (APIs).
“Digital transformation has been around for decades—think of the shifts to client-server, the adoption of ERP systems, the move to the cloud. This is a bigger digital transformation than all of them. We are talking about a fundamentally different business model.”
Marshall Van Alstyne
Questrom Professor of Management in Information Systems
Marshall, who was among the first researchers to tackle the question of what makes APIs among the most valuable IT assets an enterprise can manage, published research helping to explain why the API management industry and API-first strategies are growing so rapidly. From his research, Marshall found that the adoption of APIs is essentially creating an open architecture that lets third parties in while maintaining rules of governance, which motivate people to come, build, and create value. Marshall speaks to the positive influence APIs have on organizational growth by saying,