5 Predictions For APIs: A Consumption Perspective

By Mark Greene

This year, the relationship between application program interface (API) publisher and consumer is going to shift, and central to this is the Citizen Integrator. Traditionally, API integration has been the domain of software developers and IT organizations — until now. Citizen Integrators will be the primary consumers of APIs, but they are not yet directly marketed to by publishers.

In 2016, with the rise of Citizen Integrators, we’ll see a strong transition toward self-service and pre-built integrations that provide application administrators and application users with the ability to connect SaaS apps together in order to share and synchronize data among the apps they use to run their departments.

1. More API Integrations Will Be Done By Citizen Integrators
   The term “Citizen Integrator” is likely still a new one to many: Citizen Integrators are the non-technical people who will consume and integrate APIs more often than IT teams and developers in 2016. Think of them as the average business users, the app admins or business operations people. It’s a matter of practicality: There are too few developers, so your average business users will be the ones to integrate APIs. Marketing teams, sales departments, administrative team members — these are the non-IT Citizen Integrators who understand their data and have specific use cases to ensure they don’t duplicate data and expect applications to work together.

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