Criteria for an appropriate API Manager solution

I have come across various evaluation processes for API Manager solutions and one thing that draws attention is that few companies have a defined evaluation criteria.
Having defined requirements eliminates much of the complexity of the decision process: internal meetings, meetings with suppliers, POCs, etc.

As an example, I can cite a basic and important question, since I know that many banks, government, health and insurance companies, because they treat sensitive information, prefer on-premise solutions: that is, the solution that We are willing to evolve, can it be in the cloud?

Such a criterion already eliminates several solutions and consequently saves your team time. Still in the line of the basic questions it is important to compare components properly, as we speak in the banana market “compare bananas with bananas”. Given the various technologies available, when we talk about API, we have API Gateways and API Manager Suites.

In short, an API Gateway will perform the Proxy on an existing service, often this proxy does not have basic capabilities like: convert SOAP-XML to JSON / vice versa. As for the API Manager Suite, it is expected to have some more features, among them: API publishing tools in a Portal, security arsenal (SAML, Oauth, Tokens, JWT, etc.), store customization (Market Places) Of APIs, themes / visual identity, registry workflow in an API, governance, versioning, customization of proxies mediation, etc.

In this paper on the WSO2 website you can get an idea of how to evaluate a solution. I know there seems to be a pull to the side of the WSO2, however I have evaluated the material and there are super interesting points that can be used as support for who is determining the criteria.

Recently we answered some criteria for a client, I use to leave a picture of these items as an example:

I found the OpenSource criterion very interesting as a decision factor, because in addition to extensibility, for security reasons they can perform audits on how transactions are performed, among other important factors.

But as everyone knows, WSO2 is not the only Open Source API Manager solution, however it has the advantage of an extensive number of users and fans as well as people testing and helping improve the product. For example, I find the material below very interesting:

If you try to sign in to one of these APIs, an approval workflow will be triggered for my email, this workflow is important, not only to know the user, but for example, register it in a financial system for billing, or activate other resources etc.

Another important point, in the past, in another company that I worked on, many times when we were going to respond to an RFI from a client, because it was an open source project / product, a lot of features, we were left with WSO2 API Manager, It makes us world-class and first-class, and with the advantages of price, performance, flexibility and so on. For this reason, in the vast majority of competitions that we enter, we always have great confidence, that from the product point of view, we will have great chances of satisfying our customers, for example and some customers in the world and Latin America (about 70 customers In the World of API Management only).

If you are looking for a solution, I strongly recommend taking a look at the WSO2 API Manager. Not because I’m an employee of WSO2, but because it’s really a very complete solution and an interesting support model.