who cares about apis? (nordicapis april 2014)

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Who Cares About APIs? Nordic APIs, Copenhagen 2014

Anne-Sofie Nielsen VP, Product Development Kapow Software


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Who am I

•  M.Sc. Software Engineering from DTU

•  VP, Product Development at Kapow Software

•  Developed Kapow’s integration with LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce and Google’s APIs

•  Worked on browser-based automation for years

april 14, 2014 Confidential © 2013 Kapow Software 2


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Disclaimer

•  Kapow Software makes a living wrapping API-less web applications in “Synthetic APIs”


RES

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ava

/ .N

et

Web application

Robot

Web application photo credit: Daniela Meleo


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So, how does that work?


Workflow

Browser (or XML / JSON / PDF / Excel)


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Why this talk?

•  ProgrammableWeb.com: 11,204 APIs

•  WorldWideWebSize.com: 1.88 billion web sites



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Why this talk?




Photos: JMacPherson and David Sward


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Now, what is the ambition here?




Photo: Søren Juhl


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API First Strategy

•  It only something for the young and hip?


Evan and Fiona from API-First.com. Very hip.


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API First Strategy

Advantages

•  Easier to offer multiple front-ends (web, mobile etc.)

•  Clear division of responsibility –  Clear interface between the

work done by your backend and front-end team

–  Easier to scale your application

Disadvantages

•  Up-front cost

•  Hard to generalize based on a single example



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API First Strategy

•  Can not creating an API for your application be seen as a form of technical debt?



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It’s about the $$$

•  It’s not always the entity who builds the application that has anything to gain from an API


I Need APIs

Adapted from photo by Gemma Vittoria


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It’s about the $$$ - example


Partner portal Partner portal

Partner portal

Internal scheduling application

Who has an incentive to build these APIs?


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Partner portal

Internal scheduling application KAPOW!


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Partner portal

Internal scheduling application


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Click A Taxi – Disrupting the Taxi Business with Innovative Consumer Apps

15

Challenge Rapidly integrate with a growing network of Taxi companies and partners with no reliance on API access Solution High volume integrations across partner systems: taxi companies, restaurants, hotels, flight bookings 50 countries, 5000 cities,100,000 bookings per month, expanded globally in 18 months

“Without Kapow technology, we couldn’t have expanded into this many cities so fast. Our average partner integration now takes less than two days to complete.”

— Søren Halskov Nissen, CEO, Click A Taxi


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OK, so why did I sit through that commercial?

•  Because it illustrates some of the advantages you can gain in a programmable world –  “Let’s put humans to work where we need human minds. And

let’s automate the rest.” – Jessica Deutch, Digital River

•  And, unless you build synthetic APIs on top of the front end, that generally requires APIs to be present



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Who is going to insist on APIs?

•  Enterprises demanding cloud, cloud, cloud –  “Over the next two years, there will be an explosive growth in

the number of enterprise cloud computing projects, according to a study into cloud computing trends by TheInfoPro”, computerweekly.com

•  Can we get them as excited about APIs?



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So why demand APIs, anyway?

•  APIs lend themselves very well to automation –  Paves the way for future savings through automation of manual

processes

•  Your valuable data doesn’t get stuck in some vendor’s proprietary systems –  You can move it to other systems, or consolidate many data

sources into a single view

•  APIs should be on IT’s checklist right up there with security and scalability



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But just before we get too excited about APIs, let me be a little old and grumpy


•  APIs are not very standardized

•  Not all APIs are user friendly or well documented –  There can be a real learning curve to an API

•  Public APIs can get closed down or restricted


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Questions / Discussion

•  Have you experienced the discrepancy between those who need an API and those with the power to create it?

•  Why are we not more aggressively demanding APIs from our software tool vendors?

•  What is stopping us from creating APIs up front?

•  What would you automate or consolidate if the lack of APIs weren’t an issue?



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Thank you

Anne-Sofie Nielsen, Kapow Software E-mail: [email protected] Twitter: @femalenerd LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/femalenerd
