Brilliant! Let your developers do what they do best: making kickass functionality accessible via APIs. Don't get them bogged down in implementing the billing, rate-limiting, and other restrictive (as opposed to creative) stuff.
More coverage here too: <a href="http://gigaom.com/2013/04/24/3scale-gets-4-2m-to-help-companies-manage-their-apis/" rel="nofollow">http://gigaom.com/2013/04/24/3scale-gets-4-2m-to-help-compan...</a>