Salesforce’s Anypoint API Experience Hub Promises Easy API Adoption

Today, Salesforce announced new innovations for MuleSoft’s Anypoint API Experience Hub. The company claims businesses can now build personalized API portals in mere minutes using out-of-the-box templates. This is all designed for easy access to APIs and boost their usage and adoption. Citing recent MuleSoft research, Salesforce says 72% of customer interactions are now digital. This makes APIs essential for delivering digital experiences by integrating data and applications across businesses. The Anypoint API Experience Hub is scheduled to be available in June 2023.

In today’s article I take us through today’s announcement and draw some comparisons with MuleSoft’s competition in API developer infrastructure.

What is MuleSoft Anypoint API Experience Hub?

MuleSoft’s platform enables companies to create a consolidated source of truth and a digital storefront for all enterprise APIs. Salesforce says that with the API Experience Hub, API product managers and developers can quickly create and share API portals. API authors can brand them using advanced portal builder capabilities and grow API adoption with self-service API consumption. The platform also aims to streamline API documentation, governance, and publishing. And there are metrics designed to offer insights into API usage, quality, and compliance.

Anypoint API Experience Hub aims to help businesses, such as financial services companies, share published APIs. This is designed to support business partners who use the APIs. These partners will use self-service applications to gain access to APIs and digital services. Salesforce suggests that the platform eliminates the need for custom coding, allowing IT teams to build custom sites to share APIs with just a few clicks.

Market Comparison

I used my new market research assistant “Vern GPT” to help me make a little comparison between MuleSoft API Experience Hub. I asked ChatGPT-4 to compare these competitors and “make a table of the primary factors of analysis by company.”

Factor	Anypoint API Experience Hub	SmartBear SwaggerHub	Google Apigee	AWS API Gateway
Focus	API Portal Experiences	API Design	Comprehensive API Management	Scalable API Management
API Design & Documentation	Yes	Yes (OAS)	Yes (OAS)	Yes (OAS)
API Portal Creation	Pre-built templates	Customizable	Customizable	Customizable
API Portal Builder	Powered by Salesforce Experience Cloud	N/A	N/A	N/A
Collaboration	Yes	Strong focus	Yes	Yes
API Security	Yes	Yes	Strong focus	Strong focus
API Governance	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
API Traffic Management	Yes	Limited	Strong focus	Strong focus
Analytics	Contextual	Limited	Powerful	Basic
Integrations	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Monetization	N/A	N/A	Yes	N/A
Self-service API consumption	Yes	N/A	N/A	N/A

Suitability for Digital Transformation?

Next, I asked Vern GPT to “write bullets that list the competitors and their suitability to large-scale digital transformation projects.” Here are the results of that collaboration.

• Anypoint API Experience Hub (MuleSoft): Suitable for large-scale digital transformation projects as it offers a comprehensive API management platform with pre-built templates, advanced portal builder capabilities, and contextual analytics. The platform focuses on providing personalized API portal experiences to simplify access to APIs, which can help increase adoption and streamline integration processes for large organizations.
• SmartBear SwaggerHub: Suitable for large-scale digital transformation projects that require a strong focus on API design and collaboration. The platform provides customizable API portal creation and robust API documentation but may have limited capabilities in API traffic management and analytics compared to other competitors. This could be ideal for organizations looking to prioritize API design and teamwork during their digital transformation.
• Google Apigee: Highly suitable for large-scale digital transformation projects due to its comprehensive API management capabilities, strong focus on API security, and powerful analytics. Apigee provides a full range of features, including monetization options, making it an excellent choice for enterprises seeking an all-inclusive solution to manage and scale their API ecosystem during digital transformation.
• AWS API Gateway: Suitable for large-scale digital transformation projects that require a scalable API management solution with a focus on security and traffic management. While it provides basic analytics and supports API design and documentation, AWS API Gateway may not offer as many features or the same level of customization as other competitors. This platform could be ideal for organizations already utilizing AWS services and looking to integrate API management within their existing infrastructure.

Salesforce Perspective

Gerry Egan, VP of Product Management, shared Salesforce’s assessment: “Our vision for API management on Anypoint Platform is universal, making it easy and flexible for IT teams to have full life cycle management of any API. The Anypoint API Experience Hub enables enterprises to take that a step further by helping them quickly create engaging API portal experiences using pre-built templates for both internal and external consumption.” Yet, it remains to be seen if this innovation will deliver on its bold claims and truly streamline the API experience.

Digital Transformations Need API Infrastructure

When big companies attack digital transformation, this often means opening formerly closed systems with REST APIs. API management systems are essential to creating governable ways of exposing formerly closed systems to API access.

Systems like Anypoint API Experience Hub, and its enterprise-grade competitors, let architects and implementers work in better harmony on large digital transformation projects. With digital transformation being an endless journey, I expect this steady progress by MuleSoft to keep Salesforce customers close with a competitive API management solution.