API-enabled digital ecosystems

Application Programming Interface (API) enabled digital ecosystems are fostering because a business can package the functionality as an API product or attribute, making it available for an entirely new use case that could not have been anticipated by the API’s publisher. This has further been acknowledged and accepted by industry leaders, governments, regulators, and developers alike.

For example, an enterprise products and services firm can launch a digital partner platform through a series of APIs. As a result, companies will be able to directly apply for commercial products and services online using the firm’s digital properties or third-party partners. The firm uses APIs to expose its business capabilities to a digital ecosystem that invites partners to participate in the co-creation of monetary values. This has further been acknowledged and accepted by industry leaders, governments, regulators, and developers alike.

OpenID Foundation has created a popular digital ecosystem that is a legal entity providing infrastructure to promote and support expanded adoption of OpenID. An open source community created OpenID to solve the problem of disparate identities or credentials for logging into multiple websites. OpenID is a decentralised ecosystem open for everyone and controlled by none. People can use OpenID to offer their customers an easy way to login to their own websites or even become OpenID providers themselves. The free access (without registration or approval by any organisation) has led to the rapid adoption of the ecosystem with more than one billion OpenID-enabled user accounts and over 50,000 websites accepting OpenID for logins. Several large organisations either issue or accept OpenIDs, including Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Microsoft, AOL, MySpace, Sears, Universal Music Group, France Telecom, Novell, Sun, and Telecom Italia.