Enabling Better Digital Experiences, One API at a Time

In today’s digital landscape, customers are consuming products and services faster than ever. To keep up, organizations are adopting multichannel strategies to expand the reach of their product offerings, enhance user experiences or optimize processes to cut costs and increase bottom-line revenue. The different channels could include an enterprise web portal for procurement, a mobile app to view content, and APIs to help monitor data and automate processes.

When organizations use portals from several different partners and vendors, getting a consistent user experience across services is nearly impossible, as each portal will have its own unique user journey. At Equinix, we believe that a strong, consistent and coherent user experience across channels is vital, and that it shouldn’t be difficult for users to consume the products and services they need. That’s why we built Equinix APIs to help simplify and optimize the experience of being a Equinix customer.

APIs help users unlock the value of the Equinix Customer Portal

The Equinix Customer Portal (ECP) is a web portal that allows Equinix enterprise customers to consistently manage services and users from anywhere, at any time. Customers can use the portal to easily perform common tasks such as updating user records, placing orders, scheduling onsite services, managing order status, and accessing reports and billing information.

Equinix customers can unlock the full value of the ECP using APIs. Equinix APIs are REST-based and use standard HTTP methods and status codes. They can help customers address a variety of business challenges, including automating key processes and gathering valuable data quickly, all while taking advantage of a unified, consistent interface. This blog will provide a few examples of APIs that customers can access through the ECP, and show how they can help improve the Equinix customer experience.

Manage user records consistently and accurately

Some organizations manage and maintain a primary record of users within their applications. This could include their role-based access configurations or user permissions. Ensuring user configurations are consistent and accurate across all these records can be very complex, especially for large companies that rely on multiple vendors.

User Onboarding and Offboarding Workflows

With the Users API, you can automate your user management workflows to perform basic operations, such as creating or removing a user. You can also clone your permissions from a source user to a target user to streamline your permission assignment processes. This not only ensures the integrity of user profiles between systems but also allows organizations to perform user onboarding and offboarding with no manual intervention.

Oversee the complete order lifecycle

Our suite of order management APIs enables users to retrieve orders, manage order negotiations and cancel orders. Based on their level of permissions, users may be able to view the orders of all users within the organization in addition to their own. The APIs also allow users to place new orders for Equinix offerings such as Equinix Smart Hands and Equinix Cross Connects or schedule and manage services such as work visits and inbound or outbound shipments.

Order Lifecycle

Track assets and inventory

With the Assets API, you can filter assets based on product types and corresponding details such as asset IDs and serial numbers, or simply perform a keyword search. You can also look up port details for a specific patch panel using its ID.

Using the Lookup API to Search for Patch Panels

Access billing data when and where you need it

Credit memos and invoice information are available via the Billing API in two record types: billing summary and billing details.

The summary endpoint provides an overview of the invoice and returns information such as payment terms, due date and payment instructions.

Using the Billing API to Request a Billing Summary

For specific line-item breakdowns, the detailed endpoint returns records of individual line items like the Excel invoice under Billing History in the ECP (see graphic below). For more information on the mapping relationship between API invoices and Excel invoices, check out this information table from the Equinix Developer Platform Knowledge Center. This resource is especially useful if you’re planning to reconcile usage with billing data based on information such as quantity, unit price, adjustments and tax amount.

ECP Billing History Page

You can also filter the records based on account number, transaction ID, and start and end date to retrieve specific transactions or date ranges.

Get started with Equinix APIs today

Equinix is committed to helping our customers get the agility and speed they need to be successful in a digital world. That’s why we’re API-enabling our entire product line, allowing developers to automate every aspect of their digital infrastructures. The Equinix Customer Portal is just one example of how we’re deploying APIs to help empower developers.

To get started with Equinix APIs, visit the Equinix Developer Platform. There, you’ll be able to explore our complete API Catalog, which includes all the Equinix Customer Portal APIs mentioned in this blog and more. You can also sign up for our API Playground, which allows developers to test out our collection of mock APIs to start making sample calls, even if they’re not currently Equinix customers. You can also visit our Knowledge Center for documentation, community discussion and support, and insights from the Equinix Developer Platform team.

At Equinix, our approach to APIs is all about maximining the value of our developer ecosystem for our customers and partners. That’s why we encourage you to share your feedback with us. Contact us today to let us know how we’re doing, and share suggestions for what we could be doing better.