Startup ideas from Boston and Wharton Business Competition 2014

Covvet is an online wish list that tracks prices on the web so you never miss a sale on the things you want.Second Chance Technologies is a new online and mobile platform that fundamentally changes how consumers find the best deals and make purchases.

Project 2020 delivers cost-neutral, on-site eye care and comprehensive eye exams to businesses and their employees via a state-of-art mobile eye clinic ("eye truck”).

ServiceRoute drives commerce and increases route density for residential contractors by clustering properties for service.

Canary is a safer, local online marketplace that donates 30% of its profits to local charities.

Dashbell enables independent hotels to take control and reduce commissions paid to outside travel agencies through an online reservations tool and hotel management system.

onthebar connects consumers and spirit brands with the most effective and charming salespeople on earth, bartenders.

Nineteenth Amendment is a fashion marketplace and manufacturing service for emerging designers where we manufacture all garments that sell through our site on behalf of the designer, in the USA.

Supplet is a healthy pregnancy marketplace, community and monthly gift box service for pregnant women and new moms.

Tackle Grab is a subscription-style discovery retail service that delivers monthly boxes of fishing tackle to its members based on their preferences, coupled with an e-commerce platform that offers on-demand products.
ScreenEx provides apps and websites that simplify the online video-viewing experience with a personalized stream.
SparkFull is a mobile electric vehicle (EV) charging service.

Wellable is a mobile wellness company that leverages mobile apps, text messaging, and traditional wellness services, such as flu shots and biometric screenings, to deliver highly effective programs.

Givewell Getwell connects patients and their families to loved ones and local service vendors who want to provide support (e.g. transportation, meals, home care) through a web-based tool that integrates patient registries with a peer-reviewed directory of local services

 Abaris

Team Leader: Matthew Carey WG'15
Team Members: Jason Grimes WG'15, Nimish Shukla WG'15, Adam Colombo ENG'15

Abaris is an Orbitz for Annuities. We are creating the first of its kind online marketplace enabling consumers to easily compare quotes on insurers' guaranteed lifetime income offerings.

AdmitSee
Team Leader: Stephanie Shyu L'14
Team Member: Lydia Faya L'14

AdmitSee is a social media platform for current college and grad students to share their application details and advice with prospective students. By providing low-cost access to application tips and examples, AdmitSee aims to level the higher education playing field.

AirCare
Team Leader: Stephanie Hwang NU'14
Team Members: George Zeng WG'13, Kevin Langdon

AirCare is a communications platform that allows any clinician the ability to remotely monitor any patient, any  time, any where. Our technology integrates mobile, tablet, and web software as well as automated phone calls and text messages to send customized questionnaires to patients, improving the quality of care they receive.

AppHappy
Team Leader: Steven Mong WG'14 (WEMBA - East)
Team Members: Helen Pun W'15, Christine Skovira C'13/W'13, Linda Kang NU'15, Matthew Lee NU'16

AppHappy serves to expand the provision of mental health care by developing a mobile app providing stress management through gamified cognitive behavioral therapy.

Black Box Denim
Team Leader: Adina Luo W'16
Team Member: Molly Liu W'16

Custom jeans at designer quality. Perfect cut, wash, and fit. Delivered to your doorstep.

bookn'tell
Team Leader: Yonatan Sela WG'14
Team Members: Israel Krush, Amir Pintow, Yair Finkelstein

Bookn'tell is the first referrals engine for local service providers. We enable users to find local service businesses through credible friend referrals, book appointments online and save money when referring other friends.

Cloudbook
Team Leader: Matan Agam WG'14
Team Member: Joseph Tucker

Cloudbook is a new education technology company that modernizes exam taking, grading, security, and big data learning analytics by using a tablet-based assessment system that is easy and affordable to administer to students for on-site exams.  Cloudbook helps instructors, students, and administrators spot trends early, recommend solutions, and experience lifelong improvements.

Dana Cita
Team Leader: Susli Lie WG'14

Dana Cita, which means “Aspiration Fund” in Indonesian, aims to empower Indonesian youths to create a better future for themselves by bridging the education financing and employment gaps. Dana Cita does so by providing loans for aspiring students to attend vocational schools and universities while also connecting them to promising future careers through a job matching platform and our network of partner institutions.

FlopSports
Team Leader: Zachary Garber WG'15
Team Member: Ezequiel Baril WG'15

FlopSports is taking the idea of fantasy sports and flipping it on its head. Specifically, FlopSports users can win cash prizes by correctly predicting which players will underperform during their games.

GovPredict
Team Leader: Steven Johnston WG'14
Team Members: Emil Pitkin PhD'14, Edward Lando W'14

GovPredict is an accurate, real-time predictive analytics tool for forecasting the probability that a congressional bill will pass and that a given congressman will vote for passage. These insights are based on algorithmic machine-learning that analyzes bill characteristics, congressional voting records, district demographics, and other meaningful variables.

IDENTIFIED Technologies Corporation
Team Leader: Andy Wu PhD'16
Team Member: Dick Zhang ENG'15 (on leave)

IDENTIFIED Technologies delivers a system of flying robots to collect data, for today’s data-driven industrial businesses, in settings where it is too dangerous or physically impossible to currently place sensors.

KLAR
Team Leader: Raffi Holzer GEN'14

KLAR manufactures a coating for dental mirrors that once applied keeps them clean throughout dental procedures.

LentesCol
Team Leader: Diego Marino WG'14
Team Member: Jaime Oriol WG'14

LentesCol is disrupting the contact lenses retail business in Latin America, offering a new way of purchase that is easier, cheaper and more convenient.

Matt and Marie's
Team Leader: Justin Sapolsky WG'14
Team Member: Nicole Capp WG'14

Matt & Marie's is a modern Italian sandwich store, bringing great food and hospitality elements of fine dining to an efficient fast service setting.

OwnYourCity.com
Team Leader: Joseph Carroll WG'14
Team Members: Eoin Condren WG'14, Austin Domenici WG'14

OwnYourCity.com is a platform that allows individuals to buy a slice of previously unattainable individual real estate assets through the new concept of real estate crowdfunding. OwnYourCity will be to real estate what Vanguard.com is to index and mutual funds – a platform that provides retail investors with an investment vehicle to gain direct exposure to a very specific asset in an easy and cost efficient manner so that they can diversify their investment portfolio.

PhaseOptics
Team Leader: Frank Brodie MD'14/WG'14
Team Members: Grant Mitchell WG'14, Paul Blanton WG'14

PhaseOptics offers revolutionary imaging technology that allows for the early detection and prevention of the leading causes of blindness in the United States.

Prayas Analytics
Team Leader: Yash Kothari W'15
Team Member: Pranshu Maheshwari W'15

Prayas Analytics is a retail analytics solution that uses existing security footage to empower retailers with data to better understand customer behavior and discover store efficiencies.

ProfessorWord
Team Leader: Betty Hsu WG'14
Team Member: Ivan Chang

ProfessorWord helps students learn vocabulary in context as they read online. Check out our free tool at www.professorword.com

Roominate
Team Leader: Sally Huang WG'15 (WEMBA-West)

Roominnate seeks to transform the residential real estate marketing and home improvement industry by dramatically changing the way people visualize how they decorate their homes.

Semmantica
Team Leader: Yago Montenegro WG'15
Team Members: Jesus Baron, Natalia Samperiz

Semmantica is the online advertisement management and sales analytics software for Spanish and Latin American e-commerce businesses.

Senvol
Team Leader: Zach Simkin C'06/WG'14
Team Member: Annie Wang WG'13

Senvol works with manufacturers and analyzes their industrial parts.  Using its proprietary algorithm, Senvol determines which of these parts can be more cost-effectively manufactured using 3D printing versus the status quo.

Slidejoy
Team Leader: Sanghoon Kwak WG'14
Team Members: Jaeho Chung WG'14, Robert Seo WG'12

Slidejoy is an intelligent Android app that pays users to view beautifully designed ads every time they unlock their phones. Over time, the app learns the preferences of a user based off of previous behaviors during different times of day and at different locations and curates a more profitable and relevant user experience.

Take Command Health
Team Leader: Jack Hooper WG'14
Team Member: Breanna Hockenbury WG'14

Take Command Health is a do-it-yourself website that empowers individuals and businesses to be savvy healthcare consumers, starting with health insurance.  We are the “Turbotax” and “Mint.com” for high deductible health plans (HDHPs) and health savings accounts (HSA).  Our tools provide data-driven, personalized advice to help our members 1) select a plan 2) track their expenses, and 3) identify savings opportunities.

Urban Attic
Team Leader: Erik Stiller WG'15
Team Members: Balint Simsik WG'15, Gabe Wilcox WG'15

Urban Attic provides door-to-door storage services for individuals and businesses. We pick up goods from customers’ homes and offices, store them in secure warehouses, and redeliver specific items on request, a process that can be managed end-to-end through our website and mobile app.

VeryApt
Team Leader: Ashrit Kamireddi WG'14
Team Members: Scott Bierbryer WG'14, Andrew Mackowski WG'14

VeryApt is TripAdvisor meets Pandora for apartments.  VeryApt helps users find an apartment they will love, quickly and easily by combining user-generated reviews with big data analytics to deliver intelligent, personalized apartment recommendations.

Gravity’s Amit Kapur Says Personalization Is Going To “Explode” This Year

When Gravity was founded four years ago, Kapur said its founders thought it was “inevitable” that the web would become more personal. At the time, everything on the web was “generic” and “one size fits all,” even though “the amount of content available is exploding at scale and the screen real estate is shrinking.”

Kapur pointed to Google and Yahoo as other companies investing in this area, although the “semantics” of what it’s called may change and they might not always refer to it as personalization.

“The basic notion is that you should stop having to put in work to find information,” he added. “Information should understand you and actually find you. I think that, again, this is really the year that you’re going to see it explode, and for Gravity, the idea of combining with AOL is going to help us take that to scale aggressively.

Chrome River’s assault on stodgy expense management system

The vast majority of consumer payments are processed digitally, but this is hardly the case in the enterprise. The B2B (business-to-business) market still relies on all manner of paper solutions, including checks, invoices, and receipts, all of which drive inefficiency. That’s why Chrome River CEO Alan Rich believes “there’s much more room and need for financial innovation in the enterprise than there is, for example, around mobile wallets.”

Across the enterprise, SaaS software is replacing traditional on-premise software solutions while also rendering analog processes utterly obsolete. But the area of expense management and automated invoice processing has been remarkably disruption-free during the recent cloud software revolution – or at least so it’s appeared. While flying under the radar in Silicon Valley, Los Angeles-based Chrome River has has grown into a force to be reckoned with in the category, ranking No. 81 on the Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500 and No. 1,429 on the Inc 5000. It did so by focusing at the outset on the legal and professional services markets, a category its founders know inside and out, rather than selling chiefly to fellow technology companies.

Chrome River was founded in 2007 by Rich and Dave Terry (COO), who brought with them valuable experience gained while building their previous company, legal accounts and billing platform Elite(acquired by Thomson Reuters). The pair realized that law firms and nearly every other business struggles to manage expenses and pay supplier invoices efficiently. They formed Chrome River to build a SaaS platform that helps companies control costs, manage compliance, and drive efficiency through smarter expense managemnet. The platform doesn’t replace a company’s existing accounts payable software, but rather integrates with these systems and adds a front-end module (a browser-based dashboard) that non-finance employees can use to input expense and invoice information.

Not surprisingly, Chrome River relied on its founders’ existing relationships and market knowledge early to dominate the legal industry, outgunning legacy competitor and industry 800-pound gorilla Concur handily in what was effectively their home turf. It has now signed over half of the Global Top 100 law firms, and nearly half of the US Top-200 law firms. With that beachhead won, Chrome River has expanded rapidly into other professional services categories in the last year, adding several top accounting and consulting organizations, as well as universities, hospitals, and nonprofits. More than 30 percent of the company’s business is now outside the legal industry, a figure that it expects to see cross 50 percent by end of this year.

All told, Chrome River has grown at compound rate of a 50 percent per annum over the last four years, and 45 percent over the last two years. Fifteen percent of its revenue now comes from international clients, but the latest funding round should help drive greater geographic diversification.

“We want to maintain our growth rate, and this round will allow us to do that,” Terry says. “I like to say, you need to bulk up the whole company proportionately, across all units – sales, service, support, implementation, engineering. If you don’t it will sink you.” Apparently it wasn’t hard to find the cash, according to Rich, who adds, “You make the Inc 5000 the VCs start calling you constantly. It’s like an investor lead-gen service.”

“It’s rare to find a company who has grown this large and this efficiently without the benefit of lots of capital, but that’s our ideal scenario,” Bain partner Matt Harris says. “Capital efficiency is still a good thing, even though we don’t talk about it much. It demonstrates good habits at a management level – lots of things have to work. Could they have grown faster with access to more equity? Perhaps. But they would have likely picked up a number of bad habits along the way.”

Chrome River may be the shiniest new tool in the expense management tool box, and it’s surely more agile and modern than its that 20-year-old rival. But Concur is still a behemoth with a $5.9 billion market cap and $546 million worth of revenue over the last year. Companies like this don’t go away quietly, meaning Chrome River better gear up for a fight.

Chrome River’s value proposition relative to Concur are the product’s visual appeal and ease of use, according to its founders. “We had the benefit of designing the product recently, with modern technologies,” Rich says, implying but not saying outright Concur is outdated. “We built our platform on top of sophisticated business rules engine that allows us to offer automation and help businesses drive efficiency and improve workflows.”

“The biggest misconception about our business is that people think that the value comes from labor-savings and being more efficient in the AP department,” Terry says. “We think the bigger part of our value is improving business workflow and maintaining flexibility in changing business environments. We help companies drive fast, efficient communicate, watch their budget, capture information for deeper analysis, and gather signals to improve things early.”

Harris says that Bain’s general targets for SaaS companies are to maintain or exceed 40 percent annual revenue growth, retain 97 to 98 percent of customers year-over-year, and maintain gross margins north of 85 percent – all metrics against which Chrome River is delivering, he notes. Add in continued product, industry, and geographic diversification, he adds, and it becomes evident why this was an extremely attractive investment opportunity.

“If we had found them at a time when they had only proven themselves in the legal category and we had to make a bet that they could expand elsewhere, that would have been a much harder sell,” he says. “But today, over 30 percent of business their is outside this core vertical. We think they’ve already proven that they can do more.”

As Software Eats The World, Non-Tech Corporations Are Eating Startups

Over the past year or two, non-tech corporations have begun to actually open their wallets to arm themselves with talent and technology that can help them enter the digital and data-focused world we now live and work in. It’s no longer Google, Facebook and Yahoo that are competing to acquire the best and the brightest startups in Silicon Valley. There are plenty of corporations in retail, health, agriculture, financial services and other industries that are sending their corp-dev talent to scout out possible acquisitions in the Bay Area and beyond.

Let’s take a look at some of the examples. Earlier this year, Monsanto, a multinational chemical, and agricultural biotechnology corporation, bought big data weather tech company Climate Corporation for $1.1 billion. Insurer UnitedHealth Group bought health data analytics company Humedica for hundreds of millions of dollars. A few weeks ago, fitness clothing retailer Under Armour bought fitness tracking app developer MapMyFitnessfor $150 million. Office supply retailer Staples bought e-commerce personalization company Runa. Payments processing giant First Data has acquired mobile loyalty startup Perka andmobile payments startup Clover in the past year. Retail giant Target has picked up a number of e-commerce companies. Ford Motors bought in-car music app startup Livio. The list goes on.

Exitround, the website that launched earlier this year and lets startups anonymously seek acquirers, has been seeing a strong uptick in non-tech, corporate acquirers joining the marketplace to find potential talent and startups.

“Their main motivation is realizing that software is eating the world, and they have to add software talent and technologies to their products,” explained Exitround founder Jacob Mullins. On the marketplace, Mullins says that 10 percent of buyers are Fortune 500 companies and 20 percent of acquirers are publicly traded, with a good percentage of the group being non-tech companies.

For many non-tech companies, Exitround is providing a compelling service by which to find startups early. Mullins says that there are increasingly more and more corp-dev execs joining the marketplace to scout for talent. But traditionally the mechanism by which acquirers found acquirees was done either through word of mouth and networking or through investment banks. But Silicon Valley is seeing more and more executives from corporations and non-tech companies visit the region and VC firms to potentially network with startups. Many Sand Hill VC firms are now holding regular events with representatives from some of these non-tech acquirers in the areas of health, retail, financial services and more.

“Walmart was the earliest traditional non-tech company to figure this out,” says Jon Sakoda, NEA Partner and VC. Walmart famously bought Kosmix in 2011 and set up a Labs group in Silicon Valley, far away from the retailer’s Arkansas headquarters. The retailer has steadily acquired more companies and technologies in its fight to compete with Amazon, including four startups this year alone.

Aileen Lee, founder of Cowboy Ventures and Partner at Kleiner Perkins, believes that retail will continue to be an industry where you are seeing large companies eat software.

“A lot of physical retailers saw soft foot traffic in their stores in Q3 and they are more nervous about how e-commerce is eating into their sales,” she explains. Companies like TJ Maxx, Urban Outfitters and others can easily make a $100 million to $400 million acquisition in the current market, she adds. In fact, earlier this year, Urban Outfitters reportedly did try to buy NastyGal, a fast-growing e-commerce site for young women.

“Lots of these retailers have no commerce strategy, but startups have the potential to expand consumer reach to a younger demographic,” says Lee.

David Blumenfeld, SVP of Westfield Labs, the innovation arm of shopping mall developer Westfield, tells us that the company is definitely evaluating potential acquisitions that they can bring into their Labs groups.

“While Westfield itself is not a tech company, we believe that there is not a delineation between online and offline shopping, and we have to be a part of that,” he says. “We believe tech is core to the future of how products are bought even in malls.”

He adds that with the company’s malls, they have the distribution (to potentially 1.1 billion people, he says), and they are actively looking for technologies they can integrate into their malls.

Hunter Walk, the co-founder of VC firm Homebrew, explains that developing a deeper relationship with the customer online is a strategy that more corporations realize they need to be working on. Part of this is actually being able to connect with a potential customer where they are interacting and spending time. “Movie theaters have no idea what their customers are watching at home, and there is no personalization,” he says. He adds that he sees many of these acquisitions being under $200 million.

It shouldn’t be surprising that a mattress company may buy a sleep app.

In Under Armour’s case, the company didn’t have much of a direct relationship with the customer beyond purchase. And as a wholesaler, the clothing manufacturer needed a better way to engage with their customers. MapMyFitness is now going to be the foundation on which it plans to build a new digital training experience and mobile fitness platform.

The other benefit to buying platforms where there is engagement is the data collected, which can help potentially boost sales and personalize experiences. “It shouldn’t be surprising that a mattress company may buy a sleep app,” Lee says.

Sakoda agrees that data, and the technologies behind mining this data, are big tipping points for acquisitions from non-tech companies. “These companies have fallen so far behind when it comes to data collection and analysis and seeing how customers think and what pricing should be,” he adds. In the case of Monsanto buying Climate Corporation, the large agricultural giant was accessing massive weather data processing and collecting technology that could help in optimizing farming globally.

“Big companies are finally waking up to fact that they needed to embrace big data yesterday,” says Zach Bogue, the founder of Data Collective, a fund devoted to backing startups in the big data space. “Now every single large company has massive amounts of data, and figuring out how to use that is complex.” This is why many non-tech companies are sniffing around big data startups.

Data is a key area for content owners and publishers as well. Barin Nahvi, who works with emerging tech and new product development at Hearst Corp., says the company is looking to make more acquisitions in core technologies around data. “We’re thinking about how do we resemble a technology company more, and part of this is building platform and core capabilities,” she explains. “How to use data as a driver of content is something we are evaluating.”

Big companies are finally waking up to fact that they needed to embrace big data yesterday.

Nahvi says that video technologies and mobile are other key areas for a potential strategic acquisition for Hearst. E.W. Scripps, the storied owner of 19 local television stations and daily newspapers in 13 markets across the U.S., just bought Newsy to give the media company access to an audience that consumes their news (and video) on devices like tablets.

Of course buying startups in Silicon Valley is just one part of the challenge for non-tech corporations. The next is actually being able to keep talent happy. The cultures of these companies are vastly different from Google, Facebook and the startup culture in Silicon Valley. The true test is being able to retain talent and ensure that they feel they are part of an innovative team.

To that point, many of these companies have created “Labs” groups to house these acquisitions. As mentioned above, Walmart founded its own Labs group, WalmartLabs – which has grown to over 1,200 engineers and staff – when it acquired Kosmix. Live music giant Live Nation, which just bought mobile startup Meexo and acquired two others in the past year, has also set up a Labs group for technology acquisitions.

Walk explains that these companies are not just buying technologies, but also talent, and they have to be mindful of how to manage and foster that talent. “Just adding small pieces of technology doesn’t commit an organization to a new path,” he says. Adding to that, Halle Tecco, founder of health-focused seed fund Rock Health, says that many challenges come from not being able to actually deploy the technologies successfully.

Ethan Kaplan, the VP of product and technology for Live Nation Labs, explains that the labs group was created to house technical talent and acquisitions. He says that the labs group itself was structured to make it feel like less of a conglomerate and more of a startup. There isn’t a deep hierarchy, and Kaplan and others at the group have worked to make the engineers and other staff feel unencumbered, fast-paced and not beholden to a strict road map.

Mullins says that retaining talent is now at the top of mind for most non-tech acquirers. “Most of these companies want to make sure the transition is successful and are talking with potential acquirees early on where a startup will live and who will own the technology once it is placed in-house.”

At the end of the day, non-tech companies infiltrating Silicon Valley gives many startup founders additional exit options beyond a potential acq-hire from Google, Yahoo or Facebook. But the continued success of these acquisitions (and founder interest in being acquired by an outsider) will depend on how these companies pursue and view innovation and culture. And that’s easier said than done.

Businesses that caught our eye in Asia

India’s SmartyRing is a neat bit of wearable tech in the form of a ring. It displays all your phone’s notifications so that you don’t have to keep pulling out your phone to check what’s going on. It is proving to be very popular on Indiegogo, where the gadget has secured so many crowdfunding pledges that it is well beyond its goal.

Duriana lets you buy and sell nearby items. Find cool things for sale in your area, and sell your own pre-loved items for free.

Ayibang – which literally means “maid help” in Chinese – is a mobile app and online platform that connects people with local service providers, allowing you to mix and match temporary employees for things like regular cleaning, a heavy-duty cleaning of a new or rented apartment, and laundry. The startup revealed this week it has secured series A funding.

API Management - The way you want it

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SUMMARY:

The key challenge that comes with the shift to using APIs as an extension of their enterprise IT is choosing the right deployment model. Here’s a look at some popular ones.

Enterprises are building an API First strategy to keep up with their customer needs, and provide resources and services that go beyond the confines of enterprise. With this shift to using APIs as an extension of their enterprise IT, the key challenge still remains choosing the right deployment model.

Even with bullet-proof technology from a leading provider, your results could be disastrous if you start off with a wrong deployment model. Consider developer scale, innovation, incurring costs, complexity of API platform management, etc. On the other hand, forcing internal developers to hop out to the cloud to get API metadata when your internal API program is just starting is an exercise leading to inefficiency and inconsistencies.

Components of APIs

But before we get to deployment models, you need to understand the components of API management, your target audience and your overall corporate IT strategy. These certainly will influence your decisions.

Not all Enterprises embark on an API program for the same reasons – enterprise mobility programs, rationalizing existing systems as APIs, or find new revenue models, to name a few. All of these factors influence your decisions.

API management has two major components: the API traffic and the API metadata. The API traffic is the actual data flow and the metadata contains the information needed to certify, protect and understand that data flow. The metadata describes the details about the collection of APIs. It consists of information such as interface details, constructs, security, documentation, code samples, error behavior, design patterns, compliance requirements, and the contract (usage limits, terms of service). This is the rough equivalent of the registry and repository from the days of service-oriented architecture, but it contains a lot more. It differs in a key way; it’s usable and human readable. Some vendors call this the API portal or API catalog.

Next you have developer segmentation, which falls into three categories – internal, partner, and public. The last category describes a zero-trust model where anyone could potentially be a developer, whereas the other two categories have varying degrees of trust. In general, internal developers are more trusted than partners or public, but this is not a hard and fast rule.

Armed with this knowledge, let’s explore popular API Management deployment models, in no particular order.

Everything Local

In this model, either software or a gateway that provides API metadata and traffic management are both deployed on-premise. This could either be in your DMZ or inside your firewall. This “everything local” model gives the enterprise the most control with the least amount of risk. This is simply due to the fact that you own and manage the entire API Management platform. The downside to this model can be cost. Owning it outright might cost less in the long run, but the upfront cost of ownership could be higher than other models because your Enterprise needs the requisite servers, software, maintenance, and operational expertise. However, if the API platform drives enough revenue, innovation and cost reductions, the higher total cost of ownership (TCO) can be justified with a quicker return on investment (ROI). This model serves internal developers best and helps large Enterprises that want to start with ownership and complete control of their API management infrastructure that can be eventually pushed out to a SaaS model.

Virtual Private Cloud

In this model, either software or a virtual gateway is deployed in a virtual enterprise network such as an isolated Amazon private cloud or virtual private cloud (VPC). Depending on the configuration, the traffic can either come to the DMZ or go directly to the private cloud. The traffic that comes to the enterprise DMZ can be forwarded to VPC and the VPC direct communication can be enforced based on enterprise governance, risk and security measures. A VPC deployment may be ideal for trusted internal developers and partner developers, and allows the Enterprise to experiment with elasticity. The VPC model with multi-homed infrastructure also allows API metadata to be accessible from the Internet, but done with a soft-launch and not a big-bang. As partners grow, the infrastructure can scale in the private cloud without the need to advertise the API metadata to every garage developer out there. This option gives the enterprise similar control as the local datacenter model deployment, but with a slightly elevated risk but more elasticity.  

Hybrid SaaS

In this model, the API traffic software/gateway is installed on-premise but the developer onboarding and public-facing API catalog (or portal) is deployed in a public SaaS environment. Though the environments are physically separated from each other, they are connected through secure back channels to feed information in a near-real time basis. Communication includes information flow from the API management catalog to the API traffic enforcement point which includes API keys, quota policies and OAuth enforcement. The API traffic management pushes traffic analytics, statistics, and other pertinent API usage information back to the SaaS public cloud.

This model provides for a good developer reach and scale, as developers can interact in a shared cloud instance while keeping the traffic flows through the enterprise components. Also, this model allows you to have a split cost model; the API metadata is charged as a service (without a heavy initial investment) and the data flow component is a perpetual license, giving the enterprise a mix of both benefits. The API traffic can still come to the enterprise directly without a need to go to the cloud first which will let the enterprise use components, thereby reducing some of the capital expenditure (Capex) costs. This configuration maximizes enterprise control and security and combines that with maximal developer outreach and scale with a utility cost model.

This may seem like the best of both worlds. Why even consider other models? In practice this model may be extended and combined with the others. For example, by adding a developer portal on-premise to better serve internal developers with improved latency and more IT-architect control. It’s not about exclusive choices, but about understanding the benefits of each of the interconnections.

Pure SaaS

This is the full on-demand model. In this configuration, both developers and the API traffic are managed in a multi-tenant SaaS cloud. In the pure SaaS model, API traffic hits the cloud first and is managed against Enterprise policies for quotas, throttling, and authentication/authorization. Analytics are processed in the cloud and the API call is securely routed back down to the Enterprise. The SaaS portal is skinned to conform to the customer’s branding, has the ability to integrate web content of the customer’s choosing, and is branded with URL of the customer’s choosing so that as far as the developers are aware, the portal is owned and operated by the customer.

Due to the fact that enterprises use the cloud elastic model in this case, both for scaling and for costing, the Opex prices can be multitudes cheaper than the heavy initial investment that might be required in the previous models. In one sense, this is comparing apples and oranges: In the opex model you trade the higher up-front costs of running and maintaining your own servers with a lower monthly fee, but as we mentioned before, there may be reasons for both: A large Enterprise may run a SaaS API program for their marketing department and an internal API management program for their IT department supporting a new mobility strategy. The SaaS API option maximizes developer scale and has the lowest maintenance costs. Plus, the enterprises will require fewer resources to run and maintain the deployment. This is the option best suited for having instant updates to the API management platform with minimal downtime and high performance through CDN caching and managed fail-over and resiliency

It is never one size fits all when it comes to API management. Each situation is different based on specific needs. Examine the different deployment options carefully, and see what will work best for you, keeping in mind that these deployment models are NOT mutually exclusive as you can combine them.

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