When flexibility turns into friction
There’s a sure irony right here: in making an attempt to construct versatile, modular methods, many companies have ended up with one thing brittle and fragmented. In accordance with Postman’s 2024 State of the API Report (PDF), the typical utility now depends on 26–50 APIs. Three out of 4 organizations describe themselves as API-first, and over 60% of builders say they’ll now ship an API in below every week.
However this rising pace comes at a value. Almost 40% of builders cite inconsistent documentation as their greatest problem. Others discover themselves digging via supply code or asking colleagues simply to grasp how an API works. Round 33% of organizations now handle a number of API gateways, and 27% don’t use any vaulting instruments to guard delicate API keys and secrets and techniques. We’ve moved quick, however governance, consistency, and operational readability haven’t saved up.
The operational value of stacking APIs
Each new API would possibly really feel like a light-weight addition. However over time, they stack up, and so do the problems. Every provider brings its personal knowledge mannequin, authentication methodology, price limits, and error responses. Integrating even one API can take months; sustaining dozens turns into a full-time job. Postman’s analysis reveals that API producers in smaller organizations are notably strained, typically missing the devoted assets for documentation, versioning, or monitoring.
And when one thing breaks, due to a spec change, a deprecation, or an edge case nobody anticipated, your groups are the primary responders. This ends in engineering time shifting away from innovation and towards firefighting. Product velocity drops. Inner assist tickets go up. And customer-facing experiences turn out to be slower, much less dependable, and tougher to handle.
Fragmentation breeds friction
This type of technical sprawl mirrors a broader challenge seen throughout industries: fragmentation. In lots of firms, groups toggle between dozens of instruments, methods, and platforms every single day. A Harvard Enterprise Evaluation article reported that employees swap home windows over 1,200 occasions a day, dropping almost 9% of their annual working time to context switching. When methods aren’t well-integrated, customers turn out to be the glue: they should manually switch knowledge, double-check entries, and sew collectively disconnected workflows.
Journey companies know this ache all too properly. Reserving flows typically span a number of methods: flights in a single portal, motels in one other, servicing elsewhere. That fragmentation creates friction: for brokers, for builders, and for vacationers.
Complexity compounds over time
Probably the most harmful factor about complexity is how quietly it accumulates. What begins as an agile, choose-your-own-suppliers method can slowly flip into an internet of dependencies, brittle connections, and support-intensive workflows. Time-to-market stretches as each new associate requires vital engineering raise. Inner coaching turns into tougher. And repair reliability declines.
The difficulty is particularly pronounced for firms taking a direct-to-supplier integration mannequin. In HR tech, for instance, there are greater than 6,000 payroll and HR methods within the U.S., many with restricted or completely bespoke APIs. As Finch, a supplier of unified HR integrations, factors out, constructing and sustaining particular person connections to only a fraction of those methods can take months and even years, requiring hundreds of thousands in engineering funding for customized mapping, credentialing, testing, and model management.
The sample in journey is comparable: each one-to-one integration provides everlasting overhead, whether or not it’s with an airline, lodge aggregator, cruise line, or rail operator. The majority of prices doesn’t lie within the determination to combine, it lies in what it takes to keep up that integration over time, throughout methods, roles, and product updates. In the meantime, buyer expectations proceed to rise.
A necessity for smarter integration
Postman’s report makes one factor clear: APIs aren’t simply technical artifacts, they’re central to how companies function, ship worth, and develop. Immediately, 62% of builders work on APIs tied to income, and for 21% of organizations, APIs drive greater than 75% of whole earnings. That stage of dependence raises the stakes. Each new integration is not only a tech mission, it’s a long-term operational dedication that impacts efficiency throughout the board.
Many organizations are beginning to rethink how they combine. Moderately than stitching collectively dozens of one-to-one connections, they’re shifting towards extra unified, scalable fashions that scale back friction with out limiting flexibility.
This contains:
Single entry layers that mixture a number of content material sources behind one API.
Central orchestration frameworks that streamline routing, monitoring, and governance.
Constructed-in tooling for credential administration, error dealing with, and model management.
It’s a shift that’s particularly related in industries like journey, the place content material sources are proliferating, however agent time and technical capability will not be. Decreasing fragmentation and simplifying integration isn’t only a backend win, it’s a industrial enabler. And that’s the place the trade is heading.
What’s subsequent?
Journey companies, alongside all API-heavy companies, are dealing with a pivotal selection. The flexibleness of direct connections is highly effective, however complexity can’t proceed unchecked.
In Half Two of this collection, we’ll discover how smarter platform fashions are serving to companies scale back overhead, onboard quicker, and spend extra time promoting.
