Let's face it, if you want to take advantage of your application programming interface, API monetization is half the battle. Today we interview Bruno Pedro on his recommendations for different API business models that take advantage of great developer experience.
Read MoreAPI 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.
Read MoreAPI Economist: What exactly does a developer evangelist do?
Samantha Ready: The way I would describe a developer evangelist is part thought leader and part explorer. On the one hand, we're trying to be on the cutting edge of what's new with the software product and how to use it, and also lead the community in ways that they should be doing development with the platform. It's a blend of taking our skills and then optimizing them for our expertise on the platform, and then also trying to get that information out to the community about how they can be successful on the platform.
When you think about the term "evangelist," often it's associated with religion. What religious evangelists do is they have some dogmatic practice that they want to proclaim to the masses. As developer evangelists, we are passionate about technology and the platform, and we're trying to advocate that to the developer community.
Read MoreAPI Economist: Your article, APIs are Dead, Long Live APIs, created a little bit of a stir. What point were you trying to drive?
John Sheehan: I think it created a stir because people don't want to think that something so new could be “dead.” I was hoping to make the point that they're far from it; that the amount of attention that the consumer APIs out there get is disproportionate to the amount of total API traffic they handle.
I spend a lot of time talking with people, finding out where they actually use APIs, where they apply it most. The two things I hear most common are, "Yeah, we might use a social API here and there," or "Yeah, we might use an infrastructure API like Stripe, SendGrid, Twilio, or Parse" but the vast majority of our traffic is powering our mobile apps or internal to our company and never exposed externally. That's where most of the uptake has really happened in the last year.
Read MoreAPI Economist: How did you become the API Evangelist?
Kin Lane: I was the VP of Technology at an events management company, WebEvents Global, leading their technology and architecture. I ran all SAP events, including Sapphire for two years. I was also involved with TechEd and a lot of the North American events. I was brought on to move them out of the data center and be more elastic in the cloud, and meet the demands of the global events. I moved it into the Amazon Cloud and re-architected the whole system using APIs and Amazon APIs. I loved APIs. But I wanted to do something else. I started studying the API space. I quickly realized that there are a lot of technical pundits in this space. But no one was keeping eye on the business of APIs, the myriad of tools it takes to be successful, nor approaches to evangelism and marketing to developers and the whole politics of APIs. So I launched API Evangelist and just started studying this space. Three years later I'm still doing it.
Read More
Hello from Seattle. Terms of Use Contact us
