The API economy goals should include more collaboration

In Kevin Costner's film Field of Dreams, the "if you build it, he will come" mission was straightforward. Build a perfect baseball field in the midst of corn rows and watch the fertile plains of Iowa come to life with baseball greats and family connections. In the API economy today, building "it" can bring an enterprise to life, but getting there is not so straightforward.

The API economy we're now living in, as Gartner analysts say in this month's Network Evolution cover story, merges the virtual and the physical through digital tools that connect people, places and things. But to be effective, APIs need to go beyond technology and become part of an organization's digital strategy and target developers who need them.

In the film, the character played by Costner was trying to get the attention of an incredible lineup of historical baseball figures, but he also fulfilled a personal desire by building the field. Organizations in the API economy function in a similar way. How are vendors, developers and end users collaborating to target the right audiences while fulfilling the business need? Read on to hear from IT pros trying to build their own perfect game.

At least Costner was only building one field. Also in this edition, we see how enterprises are also exploring hyperscale techniques of large players like Amazon and Google and emulating their network infrastructure designs into their own architecture in the feature, "Running With the Big Dogs." This smaller-scale but still effective design technique has taken on its own name: the "webscaler."

Finally, learn how a move to the dark (fiber) side has helped Odessa Medical Health Center toward its goal of 100% network uptime in this month's Subnet with Brad Shook.