APIs are at the heart of digital transformation, driving innovation, integration, and business agility. However, as enterprises scale their API portfolios, challenges like duplication, inefficiency, and governance gaps can impede progress. Achieving API program maturity is the key to overcoming these hurdles and unlocking the full value of your API investments.

With the launch of ignite Lite, digitalML introduces a faster, more accessible way to embark on the API maturity journey. This entry-level solution empowers enterprises to rapidly catalog their APIs, promote high-value APIs through a next-generation Consumer Portal, and establish the foundations of effective governance—all within hours, not months.

Whether you’re looking to maximize API ROI, streamline developer experiences, or strengthen security and compliance, ignite Lite provides the tools to start making meaningful progress today.

Let’s explore how ignite Lite is simplifying the path to API program maturity—fast, scalable, and tailored to your needs.

Why API Program Maturity matters to enterprises

If you’ve been working with APIs for a while, especially if you’ve been scaling the number of APIs in your portfolio, you’re likely coming across some common roadblocks. This may include a rise in (and lack of visibility into) duplicate APIs and thus wasted developer resource, growing risks from redundant or zombie APIs, or possibly not knowing exactly how many APIs you even have.

Achieving API program maturity is essential for maximizing API reuse, minimizing API overspend, and controlling API risk at scale. This rings especially true if you’re running APIs across heterogenous environments and/or multi-cloud instances.

What does API program maturity look like? Exact KPIs (key performance indicators) will vary depending on your organization’s specific use cases, but at a high level you can expect these 3 benchmarks:

1. Developers using an API portal to find existing APIs as a first port of call, rather than always building new.
2. Maintaining an accurate and up-to-date view of every API in your portfolio.
3. Leveraging data-driven insights to effectively prioritize and implement cost and risk efficiency opportunities; speeding time to market while ensuring proper control.

Existing API platform solutions are often slow, cumbersome, and expensive to implement. That makes it hard to accelerate your maturity journey and be able to start delivering results, fast.

ignite Lite: The entry-level game changer

In response to these pain points, we’re proud to offer a new route into API success with our ignite Platform, providing a quick and clear way to accelerate your API program maturity journey

Part of our flagship ignite Platform; supporting large enterprises for over 20 years with cutting edge API solutions, ignite Lite is an entry level tier that offers you a quick and easy way to catalog all your APIs and promote the best to a next-gen Consumer Portal in hours, not months.

A branded next-gen API Consumer Portal to promote and get more value from your best APIs

Key features include:

• direct connection to ignite’s catalog to easily promote APIs to the portal (and keep them updated).
• tailorable experiences for your consumer developers to help them quickly find APIs that suit their use cases.
• rich documentation, metadata, and mocking to help them evaluate the API and decide they want to take on the dependency.
• an in-built API access form to help them easily get access to the API, and provide the provider with upfront SLAs and requirements.
• collaboration and a direct connection between the provider and consumer.

A Holistic Catalog for all your APIs. Captured and kept active from the repo with real-time metrics from your API gateways, with a way to identify and prioritize efficiency opportunities

Key features include:

• harvest and keep active from common repositories (GitLab, GitHub, Azure DevOps).
• robust reporting to identify risks and duplicates as well as “good” candidates for more adoption:
  • Using metrics from Apigee X, Microsoft Azure API gateway, Oracle OCI API gateway.
  • Reports on governance status, potential zombie APIs, and curation candidates based on call traffic data.
• basic API governance to gain an understanding of API quality against security/policies, core metadata, and basic technical attributes
  • and a way to quickly remediate issues (bulk update capability)

Who’s ignite Lite for?

The most common use cases we see for ignite Lite are:

• Medium and large enterprises with a growing number of APIs and/or gateways/environments
• Enterprise architects, VPs engineering, any role tasked with improving API program efficiency and delivering ROI on existing API investments
• Enterprises who want to see results quickly, without having to spend months on implementation and set up
• Enterprises who feel they are early on in their API program maturity; maybe you aren’t quite ready for extensive API governance and lifecycle management capabilities

How ignite Lite accelerates API program maturity: key benefits

• Maximizing API Reuse: Drive more value from your existing API investments, by providing consuming developers an easy way to find, understand and evaluate, and request access to approved APIs in your portal.
• Minimizing API Overspend: Discover and tackle duplicate, redundant and zombie APIs lurking in your infrastructure from one holistic catalog.
• Controlling API Risk: Leverage ignite Lite’s API governance to immediately understand which APIs are non-compliant, and quickly remediate.

What makes ignite Lite unique?

ignite Lite is more than just another API solution—it’s a strategic enabler designed to help you accelerate your API maturity journey with simplicity, speed, and scalability.

Firstly, it’s a vendor-agnostic platform. ignite is independent of your API gateways and technologies, enabling you to build a holistic view of everything you have. While independent, it’s still connected to your existing landscape; meaning your portal and catalog can be kept automatically up-to-date and in sync.

Unlike traditional solutions, ignite Lite separates the API catalog and portal, making them independent yet deeply connected components of your API architecture. This independence means you get a robust, centralized API catalog to track all your APIs, while the active API portal focuses on showcasing the most valuable APIs for immediate use, avoiding clutter and ensuring positive developer experience.

Finally, ignite Lite is designed to deliver results fast. The independent API catalog can be populated within just one hour, providing immediate visibility into all your APIs. Within 30 days, you’ll begin to see key outcomes—enhanced API reuse, reduced overspend, and a solid foundation for minimizing API risks. It’s a solution that gets enterprises going quickly, empowering them to move beyond the typical lengthy onboarding processes.

With these unique capabilities, ignite Lite provides a streamlined yet powerful foundation for enterprises to kickstart and sustain their API maturity program. It’s not just about managing APIs—it’s about unlocking their true value faster and more effectively than ever before.

Enterprise and Premium Enterprise Tiers: Meeting you where you are as you scale

We know API program maturity is a journey. That’s why we offer Enterprise and Premium Enterprise tiers too; for if you’re further along, have more complex needs and use cases, and/or need more comprehensive API lifecycle management and governance functionality.

Next Steps: Get started with ignite Lite’s 30 day pilot program

To celebrate the launch of ignite Lite, we’re offering a 30 day pilot program to new customers.

Instead of just an empty environment to play around in, our ignite Lite 30 day pilot program offers a unique opportunity to start delivering tangible API efficiency. Starting from the first hour set up call with us, you’ll end up with:

• A fully working API Consumer Portal, powered by a populated and active API catalog. All directly connected to your repos and API gateways.
• A clear view of any security vulnerabilities, duplicate, or redundant APIs in your landscape. Helping you prioritize efficiency and risk reduction benefits.
• A vision (and means to reach it) for your API Program Maturity journey.