FullContact API Case Study

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FullContact selects 3scale Plug and Play Cloud API Management Infrastructure to Securely Open, Control, Manage and Monetize their API to Developers


Serving up more than 1 Million contacts a day to FullContact customers — already surpassing 100 million contacts, FullContact API, managed using 3scale, puts the power of full contact information into developer’s apps.

Every business needs up-to-date complete customer contact data and almost everyone has incomplete data. Rather than use valuable resources to manually update contact information, we built FullContact to enrich and automate the process so you can spend time working with your customers. And with an open API to developers, we saw a compelling business model and innovation opportunity.

Bart Lorang, founder and CEO of FullContact.



Business Challenge:
FullContact wanted to build an open ecosystem of applications that strategically leverage the FullContact solution. The FullContact API would allow developers to drive investment and accelerate distribution in the broader marketplace. Lorang added,“APIs offer a compelling business model: We build our API once, our partners innovate new, deeply integrated apps, and with proper management and documentation we all enjoy a greatly reduced level of effort on the API side.”

“But API management is not our core competency, so we researched the top API platform providers that could help us do it right the first time. We were seeking a system with a billing solution and strong analytics capabilities.”

Results:

  • 3scale offered the only platform that offered a fully integrated billing solution and real-time analytics.
  • The unique 3scale plugin model is fast. It introduces no latency as the other solutions do in that the 3scale traffic management plugin/gateway caches active policies and applies them locally.
  • With 3scale model, FullContact was on time to market. Achieved >600 registered users


FullContact Customer Profile


FullContact is a service that takes partial contact information, such as an email address, and completes and enhances it by adding information such as name, job title, and social media profiles. FullContact will correct misspellings, add full name, update title and company to your contact source and suggest an up-to-date image. FullContact bundles all of these contact improvements up and sends them back to you in XML, JSON, or vCard format.

The FullContact API is a RESTful API that provides the same type of information that FullContact does when updating contacts. The API can be used to create programs that can access FullContact data without using the FullContact website itself.


The Challenge


To speed FullContact entry to market and access the greatest reach of developers in the shortest time, FullContact developed an API. However FullContact quickly realized that they did not want to divert resource to build a management platform.

“FullContact sought a cloud leader that understood our business, could help us reduce costs while delivering the services we needed to help us have the right API data to optimize our partner and customer channels.”
Bart Lorang, Founder & CEO, FullContact

The Solution


FullContact investigated a few different solutions: ““We were looking for a Cloud solution that would provide simplicity, speed to market and rapid integration for our developer ecosystem.” FullContact wanted a model that would scale, support continued growth, while maintaining the same high level of understanding of their business metrics. They investigated the various models, such as the perpetual licensing and “as-a-service” architectures as well as 3scale API for APIs solution.

FullContact liked the way 3scale works as a set of backend cloud services that can be called from many different integration points including:

  • software plug ins that integrate directly in an application
  • deployment within popular high performance open source proxies such as Varnish
  • or powerful CDN architectures such as Akamai or CDNetworks.

FullContact decided that 3scale was the right solution to use to rapidly expand its partner channel.

3scale stood out for its distributed architecture, rapid integration, “painless” plug in architecture, its international scope and focus on customer service and responsiveness.


The Bottom Line


“3scale offered us the most robust integration solution for billing, real-time analystics and the capability for FullContact to scale our business model and rapidly distribute our APIs.”


About 3scale


3scale provides a Plug & Play Cloud API management Platform & Infrastructure for developers, and companies to securely open, control, manage, operate and monetize their API to 3rd parties (e.g. developers, business partners, etc). 3scale customer references include Skype, Wine.com, IGN.com, Softonic and Pingar. 3scale has offices in the Silicon Valley, the UK and Spain. For more information on 3scale, visit: www.3scale.net.