Mashery

Heidi Tucker, VP of Business Development at Hoover’s followed Oren’s presentation, and explained the decisions behind Hoover’s drive to move into managed API.

Hoover’s

Heidi described the business changes at Hoover’s that mandated API publishing. The company saw the need to shift the company from a data company to a sales enablement / business decision enablement company. In order to turn this vision into reality, Hoover’s had to change its model from direct sales to channel distribution.

A published API gives the company that ability. Developers can plug in to the APi and deliver Hoover’s business insight via web applications and software tools. The benefits to Hoover’s are:

• A vast increase in Hoover’s pervasiveness in business life
• On demand information delivered to users in a flexible way
• Crowdsourced innovation

Heidi explained that Mashery has made this possible by providing access throttling, reporting, and security. The decision to use Mashery was an important one: “We had everything in the world to lose. As a data company… you have to do it right the first time.”

Hoover’s rolled out HAPI (Hoover’s API), and did as much as they could on the the developer site to keep developers happy. While Heidi admits that the company has made some mistakes along the way, they have iterated rapidly and are already seeing some wins. Developers are building apps for mobile, enterprise, and product. They’re also using HAPI as a publishing tie-in.