Dear @satya ,
Welcome to Apigee Community 🙂
Absolutely, You can use APIs instead of traditional ETL. APIs gives you more flexibility & wider audience when dealing with data. More importantly they are highly scalable & efficient.
Your Question highlights,
"What's got you here, Won't get you there"
Traditional Enterprises which deals with huge amounts of data got outpaced by Digital Natives. To compete in the digital economy, you must adopt the architectural principles and methods of digital natives.
Extract, Transform, Load gained popularity in early days of data warehousing, As the name says it's more of moving the data from one place to another place in different forms than integrate it various other ecosystems in the sense that you need in today's digital world.
ETLs are expensive, rigid, and not best designed for current consumption trends in this mobile / digital economy. APIs, on the other hand, allow you to “connect to a remote services, retrieve data or manage computations. By harnessing an API you can deliver lightweight apps without losing the key functionality or service of your business.”
Found an interesting article from here which talks about same by our CTO , Anant Jhingran. Above quotes are also taken from his dictionary. Checkout Slideshare that he recently shared his views in iLoveApis 2015 Technology Keynote.
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