APIs Gaining Ground with Businesses

Most people by now in the Internet Technology field have at least heard the acronym API.  An API (Application Programming Interface) is used to transfer data from product to product or service to service.  It's used to allow developers to integrate your product's offerings into another product or service creating a continuous network of connections.  APIs are new cloud-based libraries in a sense and can help bring together your business's connection to the cloud, mobile devices, and social networks.  Sam Ramji from Apigee, a company that "develops API tools for developers who use APIs", gave a presentation on this topic that can be found here.  In his presentation, he talks about how APIs help businesses stay ahead of the fast changing markets and the continuously fractured interest groups they are trying to reach.

The ideas behind APIs and API development are openness and distributing data as quickly and efficiently as possible.  This comes with risks and control issues.  Businesses need to send out their typically legacy information for use by outside sources that might not be under their control to manage.  Business though can control abuse by setting rate limits for information transfer or by setting access restrictions.  Innotas, a cloud based PMO, developed their API offerings with Apigee.  Innotas was looking for a solution to get their customers consistent service delivery and to gather information on in-bound and out-bound traffic.  They approached the risk of control by implementing separate analytics and traffic control to manage data transfer.

The benefits of APIs though far out weigh the risks.  In the same sense that businesses can push information out, they can also draw information in.  This new stream of information can be used to adapt and innovate their current business offerings and its APIs and develop the business's model around its API offerings.  Innotas, in their implementation, provided operational and business-level visibility into their APIs.  This gave them access to customer usage reports, helped to provide the quality they were striving for, and stayed competitive over their on-premise counterparts.  In conclusion, I leave you with the words of Chris Anderson from Wired Magazine:  "The Web is Dead.  Long Live the Internet."

For more information:
Another presentation by Sam Ramji
http://www.slideshare.net/samramji/punctuated-equilibrium-celestial-navigation-and-ap-is
The API Evangelist
http://www.apievangelist.com/