Red Hat SummitSuccess story
Weathernews builds standardized API management platform to meet demand
Fast facts
- Industry: Weather information services
- Region: APAC
- Headquarters: Chiba, Japan
- Company size: 914 employees in 32 locations in 21 countries
Overview
Weathernews Inc., a leading weather information service, helps the world respond to weather-related risks by collecting, analyzing, and processing data, then providing content to local governments, businesses, and individuals. The company wanted to speed application and service development to meet increased demand. Weathernews sought to integrate various internal and external systems with standardized, centrally managed application programming interfaces (APIs). Using Red Hat® 3scale API Management, Weathernews expanded its use of APIs for more efficient development and faster service delivery to its customers.
The path to success
Challenge: Meet weather service demand
To meet increasing demand for weather information, Weathernews needed to enhance its development of content delivery applications and services using APIs. With its partner Mitsubishi Research Institute D C S, Weathernews began building a centralized development platform, called WRAP, to create customized systems with customer-friendly content for distribution by businesses and local governments. However, WRAP needed unified management for effective 2-way data use. “We needed to create an easy-to-use mechanism to help our developers and applications immediately take advantage of APIs,” said Masaki Fukuda, service menu development group leader at Weathernews.
Case study
Weather information service standardizes and simplifies API management
Solution: Adopt open source platform to simplify API management
After considering several solutions, including open source and cloud computing options, Weathernews decided to use Red Hat 3scale API Management as the API management solution for WRAP. 3scale API management adds critical capabilities to WRAP, including data flow restriction access control, authentication and license management, security and policy controls, and a development portal. “In open source, software source code is public, and communities have abundant information and knowledge,” said Masaki. “This unrestricted access to information was a top reason for choosing enterprise technology from Red Hat, a leader in open source.”
Software & services
Results: Improve data and API use with centralized control
Gradually standardizing IT functions has helped Weathernews increase API use, leading to more consistency and eliminating platform bottlenecks. By centralizing and standardizing API management, Weathernews has improved API provisioning speed, doubling developer productivity and reducing staffing costs. In addition, Weathernews can now provide robust security capabilities for its API functions, such as user authentication and license issuance, to protect sensitive data. “It was a great benefit of Red Hat 3scale API Management that we could readily start on a small scale,” said Masaki. “The license provisioning, which had been the biggest challenge, is now done quickly and safely with access control. We feel that the solution demonstrates the level of effectiveness that we needed.”
