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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Allie Curry on mobile app decision-making for the enterprise

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Allie Curry on mobile app decision-making for the enterprise

 API Economist: What are you seeing in the enterprise when it comes to iOS versus Android?

Allie Curry: We're still definitely seeing a whole lot of iOS. It always seems to be that the main priority is getting an iOS app out first, especially internally. If it's just an app, not a customer facing app, it seems to be more likely that an enterprise is going to be buying iPads for their own employees than they're going to be buying Android tablets. However, there has been a shift recently. Enterprises suddenly want to have an Android app after their iOS app. Some are even starting to look at Windows Phone, but a very, very small amount.

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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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Kin Lane on spreading his API evangelism to the community and the government

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Kin Lane on spreading his API evangelism to the community and the government

API 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.

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Roy Veevers-Carter on how APIs simplify the complexities of the airline industry

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Roy Veevers-Carter on how APIs simplify the complexities of the airline industry

API Economist: FlightLookup has been delivering travel data to mobile devices long before the arrival of smartphones. When did you get started?

Rory Veevers-Carter: We have been serving the needs of the airline data industry since 1996. We started out taking airline data and built a dynamic routing engine and turned it into Windows flight schedule lookup products. We've expanded that core based technology to deliver it to mobile phones, originally to the Palm VII. Our flight schedule and our flight status applications originally launched when the Palm 7 came out. We've been in the value added data delivery space for travel information for a very long time.

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