Steve Wood on how APIs will power business apps in the cloud

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Steve Wood on how APIs will power business apps in the cloud

API Economist: There are a lot of different cloud offerings out there. Why do we need yet another abstraction layer for automating business processes?

Steve Wood: That's an interesting question. With ManyWho, we're doing more than just automating business processes. We're thinking about business processes as applications. For example, Salesforce CRM represents a series of business processes in sales and in service and Exact Target in marketing. Both represent business processes embedded within those applications. Ultimately, much of the reason people use applications or build software is to automate or improve a process inside their business.

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Jared Wray on the accelerated adoption of enterprise cloud computing

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Jared Wray on the accelerated adoption of enterprise cloud computing

 API Economist: Cloud adoption is clearly accelerating in the enterprise. What are some of the biggest challenges that you're seeing with the typical enterprise wanting to move to the cloud?

Jared Wray: We see really two major problems that come up in the enterprise. One problem is, how are they are going to be able to move their resources and actually take advantage of the elasticity of cloud or even the services that come along with cloud? The second problem is, how do they architect legacy applications or even mold them into a better, fully distributed type of system? Those two problems are common in enterprise, and really there haven’t been great solutions to this day.

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Paul Greenwell on the importance of the developer community to SaaS

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Paul Greenwell on the importance of the developer community to SaaS

API Economist: Congratulations on launching your new API program at MYOB. What was the strategy behind this launch?

Paul Greenwell: We've had a developer program since 2002. However, as a desktop product, it was really about how to add on solutions and connect to our core accounting system. That was enabled through ODBC, and we've got about 500 active developer partners that actually use ODBC and write solutions that fit into a number of different spaces.

For example, we have a quarterly business activity statement that has to go into the tax department for tax purposes and is required for every small business. A lot of our business partners don't want to have to write and re-implement that. Over the past 20 years, a million businesses have been using our software.

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Jeff Barr on Amazon's transformation to an API platform empowering cloud computing

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Jeff Barr on Amazon's transformation to an API platform empowering cloud computing

API Economist: There’s been a lot said on Jeff Bezos’ big mandate issued back in 2002. If I understand it correctly, it basically stated that all your teams internally would be required to expose their data and their functionality through APIs. How has this mandate impacted the growth and innovation you've seen in AWS?

Jeff Barr: The effort is very, very real. It has been for quite a while. From where I stand, it seems like a really strong, positive impact. I think back to before I joined Amazon and I was a guest at a little developer conference that we were holding. It was just me and three or four outside developers that were brought in to get a sneak preview of what Amazon was thinking in the web services world. This was around the spring of 2002.

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Byron Sebastian on the future of the API economy

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Byron Sebastian on the future of the API economy

API Economist:  I heard this quote, “Not having an API today is like not having a web site circa mid-90s.” Do you agree or disagree with this and why?

Byron Sebastian: No, I don't agree with it, I think it is a small minded way of thinking about the Internet and our industry.

APIs are a worthy technique used by developers to exchange data and data processing tasks. Right now APIs appear to be a critical part of the information revolution, one of the most important transformations in the history of civilization.

So I wouldn't compare APIs to building websites in the 90s, I'd compare APIs to the wheel, or the library, or mass production. It's both as big as those concepts and, once in your consciousness, as obvious (as "duh") as them.

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