API Strategy - A Customer Spotlight on Advanced

  September 16, 2021

SmartBear recently conducted a webinar on API strategy with Alex Savage, Head of Platforms at Advanced.

For those who don’t know, Advanced is the third largest seller of enterprise software in the UK and counts over 20,000 businesses as customers. Their customer base is diverse, ranging from healthcare providers with millions of patient records to sports teams that pack stadiums every weekend. Customers count on Advanced to make complex business processes simple and to deliver software that is consistent, reliable and meets their unique needs.

Increasingly, meeting customer needs means delivering high quality APIs. “APIs really allow us to deliver digital experiences better than ever, saving us time, and also saving our customers time” says Savage.

Two years ago, Advanced lacked a unified API strategy. Some teams had been creating REST APIs for years, others were less experienced with REST and some teams had never even had APIs. Alex wanted to make sure Advanced’s customers and partners received a unified API experience across business units. Advanced implemented an API First methodology in OpenAPI and enlisted SwaggerHub to power their journey.

Today, after using SwaggerHub for eighteen months, Advanced has gone from zero to 140 API definitions, with over 100 designers and 400 consumers using SwaggerHub.

For Advanced, success with APIs has meant an API first approach, use of the OpenAPI specification and collaboration and standardization through SwaggerHub. If you want to learn more about Advanced and how it has “advanced” it’s API strategy, you can check out the recent SmartBear Customer Spotlight webinar with Alex Savage here.