Celebrating Datalex: Setting the standard for developer visibility in API-first development
At SmartBear, we recognize organizations that improve software quality by increasing clarity, alignment, and confidence across the development lifecycle with the Developer Visibility Award. For 2025, the award goes to Datalex, a leading airline e-commerce solutions provider. Datalex equips airlines with API-driven platforms that provide tools for driving revenue and profit as digital retailers. This award recognizes Datalex’s demonstration of how enhanced developer visibility enables scalable modernization and stronger collaboration across teams and customers.
Making visibility foundational to API modernization
As part of a broader platform modernization effort, Datalex’s REST 3.0 team moved from a legacy stateful architecture to a modern, stateless RESTful platform using an API-first approach with SmartBear Swagger.
The team centralized API planning and design in Swagger, aligning architects, developers, product owners, and integration specialists on shared request and response schemas, examples, and endpoint definitions before implementation began. This early alignment reduced design rework and accelerated the design phase by 40%, creating a more predictable path to delivery.
Improving collaboration across teams and stakeholders
Developer visibility extended across engineering, QA, and downstream integration teams. Swagger served as a single source of truth for API contracts, enabling UI teams to generate client code directly from schemas and reducing interface misalignment. As a result, development turnaround time improved by approximately 30%.
As the team scaled from two to five engineers, centralized documentation and version history reduced onboarding time by more than 50%. This also helped maintain consistency and avoid design drift among the growing team.
By sharing API designs early with airline customers, Datalex improved clarity and alignment ahead of development, helping set clearer expectations for future integration work.
Managing changes with confidence
Swagger’s versioning and governance capabilities helped Datalex manage breaking changes, maintain backward compatibility, and communicate updates clearly across teams and customers. These practices improved deployment predictability, reduced production integration issues, and increased confidence with each release.
Delivering measurable value to end users
These visibility-driven practices resulted in a more consistent and reliable experience for airline partners integrating with Datalex’s APIs. Well-structured schemas, clear examples, and standardized payloads reduced integration friction and shortened time to go-live. Auto-generated client code further improved accuracy and reduced onboarding effort.
Developer visibility in practice
Datalex’s approach demonstrates how developer visibility, when embedded across the API lifecycle, supports faster delivery, stronger collaboration, and higher-quality outcomes.
Congratulations to Datalex, the 2025 Developer Visibility Award winner!
Interested in being recognized next?
We’re now accepting submissions for our Q1 2026 AI Builders Award, celebrating teams using Swagger and AI-driven development to build smarter, faster, and more impactful APIs. If your organization is pushing the boundaries of AI-powered API innovation, we’d love to hear your story.
Submit your entry here: https://smartbear.com/lp/ai-builders-award-swagger/