2020 "Postman State of the API” Reveals API Investments Will Remain Strong

More than 13,500 respondents told Postman that while the pandemic put the world on hold, API development continues to surge.

Postman, the leading collaboration platform for API development, today released the results of its 2020 State of the API Report. The annual report, the largest and most comprehensive survey of the API industry, surveyed 13,586 API developers, testers, executives, and others to understand who is working with APIs, how they are getting their work done, and where they see the industry headed.

Key survey findings:

• API investments have remained strong: Close to half of respondents stated that investment of time and resources into APIs will increase over the next 12 months, while another third stated that investments into APIs will stay the same, despite a challenging economic environment.
• The pandemic has changed the world, but it didn't stop APIs: 89% of industry members surveyed stated that their organizations offered remote work options as a result of COVID-19. Nearly a third (30.6%) said that APIs played a role in their organization's ability to respond to COVID-19 by facilitating customer communications, powering remote work options, and quickly responding to regulatory changes and government initiatives.
• APIs are the nucleus of digital transformation: For those working on digital transformation initiatives, 84.5% state that APIs are playing a significant role in those initiatives.

 

"Our annual survey reveals that the API ecosystem is expanding, investments are flowing, and momentum for an API-first philosophy is being embraced more and more, " said Abhinav Asthana, Postman's co-founder and CEO. "The data also shows us the importance of APIs and their role in responding to sudden and tectonic shifts in the way businesses, governments, and nonprofits operate, including pandemics."

 

Over 60% of survey respondents rated themselves as 5 or better (out of 10) in terms of embracing an "API-first" philosophy, which indicates a groundswell toward API-first. The API industry also continues to touch just about every job role, from developers to management to sales, and even to the C-suite. In fact, 1 in 10 of those working with APIs today are in management roles—from the C-suite through to directors and managers.

 

"After a full review of the data, we found that more than 7 in 10 respondents said the most important factors they consider before integrating with APIs were reliability, security, performance, and documentation," said Postman Chief Evangelist Kin Lane, who works with many companies that are integrating APIs. "However, less than half of the respondents indicated that pricing was an important factor."

 

Additional survey findings:

●       Lack of time (52.3%) is the number one obstacle to producing APIs. Lack of documentation (54.3%) is the number one obstacle to consuming APIs.

●       Respondents felt they should spend more time designing (11% of their time, in an ideal world) and automating testing (15%) for APIs, and less time debugging APIs (10%) than what they experience in real life: Only 8.7% of time is spent designing APIs and 11% of time is spent automating API testing, while 17% of time is spent debugging APIs.

●       REST (93.4%) is the dominant architectural style, followed by webhooks (34.4%), SOAP (33.4%) and GraphQL (22.5%). JSON Schema (75.6%) is the dominant API specification, followed by Swagger 2.0 (43.9%) and OpenAPI 3.0 (27.8%).

●       Microservices (48.7%) is the future technology respondents are most excited about, followed by Kubernetes (43.6%) and containers (42.2%).

 

About Postman

Postman is the leading collaboration platform for API development, used by more than 12 million developers and 500,000 companies worldwide. Postman is an elegant, flexible platform that is used to build connected software via APIs—quickly, easily, and accurately. Postman is headquartered in San Francisco and has an office in Bangalore, where the company was founded. Postman is privately held, with funding from Insight Partners, Nexus Venture Partners, and CRV.

Postman Closes $150 Mn Series C Funding at a $2 Billion Valuation

Postman, the leading platform for API development, announced today that it has secured $150 million in a Series C investment round led by Insight Partners, a global venture capital and private equity firm. Insight Partners joins previous investors CRV and Nexus Venture Partners in this round.

APIs are the fundamental building blocks of all software in the world. Today’s complex software ecosystems make the rapid creation and seamless deployment of APIs an industry imperative. Used by more than 500,000 companies globally, the Postman API Platform helps them accelerate their pace and effectiveness of software development.

Postman is leading the shift to an API-first approach which means building APIs at the very beginning of the development cycle and collaborating closely between all stakeholders like product management, DevOps, and quality engineering. According to Enterprise Strategy Group, companies using the Postman API Platform show vast improvements to API development, collaboration, and testing. These improvements include API development that’s five times faster, collaboration that’s ten times more effective, and the ability to find and fix bugs four times faster.

According to CEO and co-founder Abhinav Asthana, “Developers all over the world are rapidly transitioning from the code-first mindset to an API-first mindset with Postman being the center of this revolution.”

More than 11 million users around the world rely on Postman to streamline collaboration and simplify each step associated with building APIs, and the company’s solution is used by 98% of the Fortune 500 to create better APIs more quickly. A winner of the Gartner Peer Insights Customer Choice Award, the Postman collaboration platform is used by top companies such as Intuit, Microsoft, and Shopify.

“Modern-day commerce is driven by API-connected, cloud-based software, and Postman is in the absolute vanguard of companies driving faster and more effective development of solutions across a multitude of industries,” said Jeff Horing, co-founder and managing director of Insight Partners. “The combination of the market opportunity, the management team, and Postman’s proven track record of success shows that they are ready to become the software industry’s next great success."

Atlassian Engineering Manager Jeff Gibson, a Postman customer, said, “At Atlassian, the Postman platform enables us to quickly onboard new hires and has increased our overall developer productivity. The ability to collaborate while building new services and integrating third-party capabilities has made life easier for our developers. Adopting Postman was a smart decision that has delivered real ROI."

About Postman


Postman is the leading collaboration platform for API development, used by more than 11 million developers and 500,000 companies worldwide. Postman is an elegant, flexible platform that is used to build connected software via APIs—quickly, easily, and accurately. Postman is headquartered in San Francisco and has an office in Bangalore, where the company was founded. Postman is privately held, with funding from Insight Partners, Nexus Venture Partners, and CRV. Learn more at http://www.postman.com or connect with Postman on Twitter via @getpostman.

APIs Expanding Beyond Developers - Reveals 2019 Postman "State of the API" Report

A new survey of more than 10,000 respondents found that more non-developers now work with APIs than ever before as the API ecosystem expands.

Postman, the leading collaboration platform for API development, today released the results of its annual 2019 Postman “State of the API” Report. The report is based on a survey of more than 10,000 API developers, users, testers, and executives. The respondents provided insights on everything from how their time with APIs is spent to what they see as the most significant issues and opportunities for APIs in 2020.

While the survey reports that more developers work with APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) than anyone else in a typical organization, the reach of APIs is increasingly touching more people than just those who code. Only 46.6% of respondents identified as being either a front-end or back-end developer (compared to 58.6% last year), with QA engineers, technical team leads, API architects, DevOps specialists, and others rounding out the field.

“This year’s survey data reveals that the API ecosystem is expanding beyond developers,” said Abhinav Asthana, Postman’s co-founder and CEO. "Working directly with APIs has become part of a surprising number of positions, including non-developers such as executives and technical writers, which we think is an intriguing trend.”

Key data highlights from the survey include:

API Security: While API security is a hot topic—driven by frequent reports of API security breaches and misuse—respondents feel confident in their API security postures. Nearly three-quarters feel that their APIs are “very secure” or have “above-average security.” Only 2.4% stated that their APIs were not at all secure.

API Documentation: The most helpful enhancement that API producers can make is to provide better examples in the documentation (63.5%), followed by standardization (59.4%) and sample code (57.8%). API consumers also find real-world use cases, better workflows, additional tools, and SDKs helpful, although to a lesser extent.

Additional data points:

• Experience: 78.2% of developers have 5 or fewer years of experience developing APIs; 12.2% have 10 or more years of experience


• Team Size: 72.6% work on teams of 10 members or less, 25.7% on 22-50 member teams, and 1.7% on 50+ member teams


• Time Spent: 26.1% of time is spent on development, 22.2% on debugging and manual testing, 11.4% on automated testing, 11.2% on designing and mocking, 9.1% on managing others, 7.3% on documentation, 5.7% on monitoring, 3.6% on publishing, and 3.3% on writing about APIs (NOTE: 70% spend more time on manual testing and debugging than they thought they should)


• Number of APIs: 39% generally work with 1-5 APIs, 22% with 6-10, 14% with 11-20, 11% with 20-50, and 13% work with more than 50 APIs


• Internal vs. External: 52.8% of APIs used are internal, 28.4% used were shared only among integration partners, and 18.8% used are public


• Performance: 47.6% feel that their APIs do not break, stop working, or materially change specification often enough to matter, 28.4% said it happens monthly, 15.7% weekly, and 3.2% daily


• Industry: 52.3% work in technology, 41.2% in business and/or IT services, followed in order by banking and finance, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, government/defense, advertising/agencies, nonprofits, and a variety of other industries.


• Technology: 53.9% said microservices is the most exciting technology for developers in the next year, while 45.5% said containers and 44.0% said serverless architecture (NOTE: OpenAPI 3.0, GraphQL, HTTP 2.0, and WebSocket were also considerations)

The complete “State of the API” report can be found here: https://www.getpostman.com/resources/infographics/api-survey-2019/

About Postman:

Postman is the leading collaboration platform for API development, used by more than 8 million developers and 400,000 companies worldwide. Postman is an elegant, flexible platform that is used to build connected software via APIs – quickly, easily, and accurately. Postman is headquartered in San Francisco and has an office in Bangalore, where it was founded. Postman is privately held, with funding from Nexus Venture Partners and CRV.

Postman Follows Successful $50 Mn Series B With Two Key Hires

Postman, the leading collaboration platform for API development, today announced the addition of Nick Tran, vice president of marketing to its executive team and Kin Lane as chief evangelist.

The hires follow Postman’s $50 million series B funding in June of this year to extend its leadership in the API collaboration space. Postman is methodically building the backbone of the API industry of the future. Organizations of all sizes trust in Postman to create the product and workflows they need to design, develop, launch and maintain APIs.

Tran brings more than 20 years of experience in technology, marketing and software to his new role. He will head up worldwide marketing for Postman, including product marketing, creative, developer relations, and documentation.

Lane is a preeminent API evangelist in the industry. He has spoken at numerous API academic and industry events, was involved in the European Commission’s API research program, and received a Presidential Innovation Fellowship in 2013. He will help share the story of how Postman is the next generation of API development platform.

“Postman is scaling from a development environment to a robust platform that meets the needs of the entire API lifecycle,” said Abhinav Asthana, Postman CEO and co-founder. “Nick and Kin bring extensive experience as we structure our organization to meet the needs of the API community of tomorrow.”

Tran was previously vice president of marketing at Akamai, where he directed the developer brand and product marketing of developer-facing products and features. Before Akamai, Tran worked at Salesforce as the vice president and COO of developer marketing, where he led a global team in the U.S., EMEA and India that market Force.com and Heroku to developers and partners worldwide.

“Joining Postman made a lot of sense,” said Tran. “There’s an amazing community of 9 million developers that love the product and the company. This is a dream come true.”

Lane was most recently an API architect for F5 Networks and an API evangelist at Mimeo. He has a reputation in the API industry for developing an understanding of the common building blocks API providers are using across the API lifecycle.

"I have joined Postman because I've witnessed first-hand how ubiquitous the platform is across almost every business sector,” said Lane. “Postman is the future of how developers, and non-developers, will collaborate consistently across the entire API lifecycle."

About Postman: Postman is the leading collaboration platform for API development, used by more than 9 million developers and more than 400,000 companies worldwide. Postman is an elegant, flexible platform that is used to build connected software via APIs – quickly, easily and accurately. Postman is headquartered in San Francisco and has an office in Bangalore, where it was founded. Postman is privately held, with funding from Nexus Venture Partners and CRV.

Postman Relocates Its Corporate Headquarters from Bangalore to San Francisco

Postman, provider of the most popular API toolchain available, today announced that it has moved its corporate headquarters from Bangalore, India, to San Francisco to better serve the needs of its community: API developers.

The new San Francisco office will house all sales, marketing and customer success staff, as well as executive leadership. Postman’s CEO & co-founder, Abhinav Asthana, has relocated to the company’s new headquarters in San Francisco as part of the move.

Postman’s core technology team will remain in India, under the leadership of Ankit Sobti, Postman’s CTO & co-founder. Postman has been growing in India as well, expanding its development and data science staff and moving to a new, expanded office in Bangalore early this year.

“We believe this company setup will best serve our customers and allow us to more quickly react to opportunities and trends,” commented Asthana. “We have a great technical team in Bangalore, where we were founded, and our new U.S. presence will allow us to be more responsive to our customers, many of whom are based in Europe and the U.S.”

In addition, the company announced the addition of a new board member, technology strategist Ram Gupta. Gupta is a seasoned executive with over 25 years of technology experience, helping create over $10 billion of market capitalization through both operational and board roles. He has worked with companies of all sizes, from start-ups to large public companies, holds several U.S. patents, and joins the Postman board as an active advisor on issues of product, operations and marketing.

The company also named Kasey Byrne as Vice President of Marketing. With a focus on company growth and helping build the San Francisco team, Byrne brings significant experience with marketing and early stage companies, having held senior positions with companies such as Overture (formerly GoTo.com), Cardlytics and npm, Inc., as well as deep agency experience.

Postman counts developers and developer teams around the world among its users. The company launched Postman Pro in December 2016 for both individual developers and developer teams and is in development of an enterprise product, targeted for release later in 2017.

Postman Announces Postman Pro: Complete API Toolchain for Developers & Developer Teams

Postman, provider of the most popular API toolchain available, today announced a major update to its innovative developer product, Postman Pro. In limited release since early this year as Postman Cloud, the product has been rechristened Postman Pro to reflect its more extensive features, numerous integrations and broad appeal. Early Postman Cloud users number among the largest and most innovative companies in the world, including such names as Adobe, VMware and DocuSign.

With today’s product release, developers can leverage the power of Postman at every stage of their API workflow, from development & testing, through collaboration, documentation & publishing, to API monitoring. Postman began as a simple tool to make API testing faster and easier, and has expanded into a powerful, collaborative and user-friendly toolchain, allowing Postman customers to streamline and simplify every aspect of API development.

“My research has consistently identified the value of a unified toolset spanning pre-production, deployment and production monitoring lifecycle stages in breaking down silos between API development, API publishing and production monitoring,” said Julie Craig, of Enterprise Management Associates. “This, in turn, supports more efficient API delivery, supporting both internal and external customers.”

Postman’s Complete Toolchain, Covering the Entire API Workflow

Postman’s free, downloadable app is the most popular tool for API development & testing, and is used by more than 3 million developers worldwide. Postman Pro extends the Postman toolchain through the entire workflow, with functionality for collaboration, documentation & publishing and even monitoring.

“Postman Pro is unique among API tools in providing this breadth of features,” commented Abhinav Asthana, CEO and co-founder of Postman. “Technical teams can now leverage Postman at every stage of development, streamlining their workflow and making API development faster, easier and painless.”

Key features of Postman Pro include:

• Collaboration:
  
  
  
  • Share collections and environment within a common team library
  
  
  • Access the most updated version of team assets automatically
  
  
  • Examine changes and updates, tracked line by line
  
  
  
  


• Documentation & Publishing:
  
  
  
  • Extensive, easy-to-consume documentation format, including requests, collection descriptions and code snippets
  
  
  • Viewable via web page, either internally or published publicly
  
  
  
  


• Monitoring:
  
  
  
  • Flexible monitoring of API request collections, to test for uptime, responsiveness, and correctness
  
  
  • Dashboard of monitoring results, available for each collection and monitor
  
  
  
  

Postman for the Developer

Postman has enjoyed explosive growth since its introduction in 2012, with developers at more than 30,000 companies using the company’s free Mac, Windows, Linux and Chrome apps. Postman estimates that its API format, the Postman Collection, is the most used API format among developers, with nearly 200,000 Postman Collections created every week.

“Postman is more than just a API test tool, it is a complete API productivity suite,” said Alan Renouf, senior product line manager at VMware. “Postman has enabled our team to easily test and provide feedback to the API development teams. Postman has been a key tool when demonstrating APIs to our developer and automation-based customers, in a simple, easy-to-use interface, without extensive coding. It is a great learning and discovery tool."

Postman was designed by API developers specifically to make the API developer’s life easier. As a result, Postman has emphasized supporting, not replacing, a developer’s existing workflow. Postman has the capability to import multiple API formats, and has released integrations with other tools to allow developers to use Postman within their own custom work environment. Postman Pro is launching with five integrations, including connections to GitHub, Slack, and Jenkins.

“Postman’s vision of a unified workflow executing across an integrated lifecycle will allow developers to plug in the tools they already use to a common framework supporting API delivery,” commented Craig. “Such an approach helps “grease the wheels” of Development and DevOps teams, who require a common view across tools to facilitate cross-lifecycle collaboration.”

Image Source: ShutterStock

Indian Postmen Will Soon Deliver Customized Weather Reports to Farmers

Indian postmen might soon have another task up their sleeve other than delivering Indian's their precious letters/mails. The country’s public weather forecaster, India Meteorological Department (IMD), is contemplating of giving Indian postmen an additional responsibility of a weatherman.

The IMD has decided to pilot a scheme to take benefit of the massive network that India Post has cultivated over the years and use it to collect and deliver important weather information to the country's farmers.

To start with, a postman will be provided with a template form when he goes to a village. The form will have some basic questions, like land usage, cropping pattern of the village, etc. The postman would be required to fill the form and get the phone numbers of some of the farmers from the village.

IMD's objective with the scheme is very simple, they intend to reach to as many farmers as possible. Since India's postal department has over 1,54,800 post offices across the country, with almost 90% of them in rural areas, they proved to be a perfect fit for the weather department. After reaching the country's hinterlands, the IMD plans to take the help of the Indian postmen to collect information that will help the department in providing farmers with custom-made weather and crop advisories.

AgriMet, IMD’s agriculture division, is gearing up to run the pilot programme in five villages across Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Punjab, Uttarakhand, and Gujarat. While the places have been decided, the cost of the project is still being deliberated upon.

Despite of being the third-largest economy in the whole of Asia, a large majority of farmers in India even now fully depend on the rains to make their decisions on sowing and harvesting. In fact, less than 50 per cent of India's total farmland is irrigated. This means, an inaccurate weather forecast ends up having a catastrophic effect on the country's entire economic cycle as the country's farmers have to suffer huge losses. Seeing India go through two consecutive drought years, the weather department decided to take some serious steps and bail the farmers, the agriculture sector and the whole of country out of this crisis.

The AgriMet is also contemplating on installing screens at the village post offices so as to display information on weather and crops directly to the farmers.

It is no secret that when it comes to monsoon predictions, the IMD has had a shaky past. For instance, it completely missed out on predicting the 2009 drought, which was the worst drought that the nation faced in the last four decades. Further, the department's forecasts have often diverged from the ones of Skymet, which is India’s biggest private forecaster.

In order to restore people's faith in the department and do away with all the discrepancies, the government has decided to spend about $60 million on a supercomputer that will help in increasing the department's precision in forecasting.

India Post's extensive network across the country isn't helping another industry for the very first time. It has received a payments bank license from the RBI, all thanks to its deep reach into the country’s hinterlands. Further, the department has also partnered with leading online sellers in the country such as Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal for deliveries.

Since, the Indian postmen will now also be doubling-up as weathermen, the responsibility of ensuring timely deliveries now becomes important than ever.

[Top Image - Pixabay.com]