Getting out of the IT weeds and into profitable up-the stack use-cases is a goal at many enterprises. This trend seems to be extending all the way to Application Program Interfaces where the old method of design is being up-ended, according to Vikas Anand (pictured), vice president of product management at Oracle Corp.

“A lot of times APIs were built bottom-up, which meant that they were not designed for the experience that you were looking to deliver,” Anand said about the shift taking place. In other words, there may have been some IT benefit but not always a business benefit.

Anand spoke to John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, at SiliconANGLE’s Palo Alto, CA, studio, and said that a top-down approach is becoming more popular.

The new approach looks first at potential use-cases, the business model, customer satisfaction, operational inefficiencies or means to communicate with the ecosystem. Having defined goals in those areas, developers then design the API specifically to fulfill them.

“You quickly prototype the API; you run mock testing and see the end results before you get into the implementation, which really changes the game plan of how you deal with APIs going forward,” he said.

Oracle acquired API management company Apiary Inc. last January to add these capabilities to its catalog.

API-first strategy

This “API-first strategy” as Anand called it, is augmented by a cloud that enables integration across hybrid environments.

Oracle’s API Integration Cloud allows customers to use their APIs in any environment they choose and manage API proliferation and sprawl.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBEConversations.

Photo: SiliconANGLE