Next Generation of API Service Provider: APIphany

by Kin Lane on 10/25/2012

I get so busy sometimes my stories pile up. Some only seeing the light of day when I get caught up on research, projects, travels and speaking. On story I’ve been meaning to write for almost 3 months now is about APIphany, one of the new generation of API providers. I met the APIphany team in person when I went out to Washington DC in August.

The APIphany team was cool enough to come out and support my API Craft meetup in DC, then the next morning I went out to their offices and met the rest of the team. APIphany sees the industry very similar to me, and believe in self-service, pay as you go API services that allow for anyone to innovate around APIs.

I’ve been watching their progress and they have 3 very cool projects made public so far:

Washington Post - Developer area for Washington Post, providing some endpoints including an Issue Engine API, White House Visitors Log API, and the Campaign Finance API
Houston Metro - Developer portal for the Houston area, providing public transit in the Houston metropolitan area for bus and rail
The Voting Information Project (VIP) - Offering APIs and developers tools to provide voters with access to customized election information, helping them navigate the voting process and cast an informed vote

When I met the team in August, they described how they were building out so many custom projects for customers that were API driven, they decided to standardize their approach and offer a product. The APIphany API management solution provides all the standard offerings we are getting used to in the space:

Administration Portal
Developer Portal
Key Management
Access Control and Security
Subscriptions and Billing
Monitoring
Analytics and Reporting

APIphany also gives you the ability to host the API in a variety of cloud providers, and my favorite is they provide you with an API to manage your API. The team has been building and managing web APIs for government, enterprise, and non-profit customers since 2006--so they get it.

APIphany is also supporting the API Strategy & Practice Conference in New York City, November 1st and 2nd. If you want to meet the team, you should make sure your there--if not just head over to apiphany.com to talk with them directly.