The following are five forward-looking trends highlighted by Apica:

API Economy – The New Business Engine

As more and more applications are created to help communicate, work, purchase and play more efficiently, developers and application providers leveraging application programming interface (API) will become the norm. Many of these tools are large and tie to other parts of an organization like transactions, shipping and warehousing. According to Kristin R. Moyer, VP and distinguished analyst at Gartner, "The API Economy is an enabler for turning business or organizations into a platform."

Prediction: Due to this trend and drive many parts of the business we will aggregate a number of these functions on to API’s driving the economy of things. To ensure these combined API’s deploy and function properly application creators will lean more heavily on visibility and testing solutions.

Speed of Application Development

In order to stay competitive organizations have speed up their application development to light speed by moving away from the traditional three layers of testing to an automated model. Unfortunately, some organizations hesitate to automate and continue this methodical approach to application development resulting in competitors eating up any market share available. Some of today’s most advanced applications are the ones that are integrated and automated within the test automation phase.

Prediction: We predict that more and more automation will require new levels of testing to speed up the development process. Testing and analytics tools today can provide a holistic view of application development to where you can now test new features that weren’t available months ago.

DDoS Attacks Continue in a Social Way?

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks continue to flood the enterprise with disruptions and targeted miss conduct. But not like they did a few years ago. Today’s attacks are being rolled out through social media channels that weren’t even a consideration just a few years ago. The reality of these types of DDoS attacks are that they are being delivered via real people versus bots or computers now. More and more of these attacks are tied to specific actions of companies that the consumer doesn’t agree with. What was old is new again, as DDoS attacks move from the traditional attack vectors to social channels.

Prediction: We expect to see more attacks on the horizon as companies continue to take advantage of social media to build customers and brand confidence. Organizations will look to traffic visibility tools to ensure these attacks, just like the traditional attacks of the past, don’t create downtime and disrupt sales and a key communication channels to customers.

B2B Shopping Experience Becoming More like B2C

As e-Commerce will dominate the news headlines over the rest of the year, it is B2B e-Commerce that is becoming the bigger revenue generator in the U.S. and around the world. Forrester Research reports that B2B e-Commerce sales in the U.S. reached nearly $800 billion in 2015, and predicts that it will grow to $1.13 trillion in 2020. Clearly there is an increasing demand among business owners to have a similar experience when shopping for business solutions as they do when buying a cell phone or other personal items online.

Prediction: B2B organizations will take advantage of all of the B2C industry advancements to improve their model and shopping experience. Despite having low volume, B2B tends to have higher value for each sale. It will be important to ensure online assets are available and meet e-Commerce purchase models.

Analytics for Both Sides of the Business

Comparing sales data with performance data creates a strong bond between the two. A platform that performs faster will lead to higher sales. On the flip side, the loss can be significant when performance takes a hit. For instance, Amazon found that a 100ms increase in page load latency translates to a 1 percent drop in sales. Performance is an often overlooked KPI.

Prediction: Performance and sales will align more in 2017 as organizations establish KPIs to increase profits. Maximizing profitability will take presence in order to capitalize on conversions without overspending on unnecessary infrastructure. Advanced load testing platforms provide the means to test web applications performance under real-life end-user demands without doing it on a live, unsuspecting audience.