September 04, 2013

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

September 04, 2013/ Vladimir Vinogradsky

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.

August 27, 2013

Jared Wray on the accelerated adoption of enterprise cloud computing

August 27, 2013/ Vladimir Vinogradsky

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.

July 25, 2013

Chia Hwu on the anthropological side of mobile app design

July 25, 2013/ Vladimir Vinogradsky

API Economist: The API Economist is very interested in your understanding and expertise of the smartphone market. What’s fascinating is that Apple is deriving the majority of profits from the iPhone. Yet Android devices surpass iPhones in total numbers. What does this mean?

Chia Hwu: Apple is very committed to their hardware platform. It's not going to go away anytime soon, because it’s where the company makes the most money, so Apple’s commitment to the iOS platform is in billions of dollars of revenue. On the other hand, Google, which doesn't make much money from Android, could decide to do things differently in a year or two. Google’s executives could decide, "We're not making any money on Android, so we're changing our mobile and now we're going in a new direction." That's one thing we think about at Qubop, since a mobile strategy should take into account how platform owners are making money.

July 10, 2013

Jonathan Murray on the political economics of technology & automation

July 10, 2013/ Vladimir Vinogradsky

API Economist: When it comes to cloud computing, what’s the future of data sovereignty and the need for data to reside in-country?

Jonathan Murray: It all boils down to political economics. A very good friend of mine is Professor John Zysman at UC Berkeley. John's a political economist and he spends his life thinking about what's the intersection between government institutions, policy, regulation, and how economies develop. One of the things John told me very early on, when I first met him, was that you can look at the world in two ways: there's the potential of technology, where we can see this bright future and all the opportunity, and then there is the regulatory environment, social context, and the economic context that technology has to fit into. Ultimately, the pace at which technology is adopted and the degree to which technology is adopted is driven by both government regulation and cultural frameworks, and not by the desires and the interests of the technology industry.

June 05, 2013

Allie Curry on mobile app decision-making for the enterprise

June 05, 2013/ Vladimir Vinogradsky

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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