Best Buy

This post, part of a guest blog series on platform success strategies, originally appeared on Programmableweb.com

In 2013, Learning how to enable your business with APIs is a common theme among enterprise IT departments and also among business. Enterprises are seeing that the current state of SOA Governance is headed towards extinction. These enterprises face a new kind of tension: the app and API economies on the one hand, where enterprises drive new revenue streams by (gulp) publishing corporate data APIs for third-party developers to use, and SOA on the other, where tight governance is the name of the game. But the loose coupling in RESTful web services forces a discipline all its own.

Large companies have been a part of the API game from the start.  Ebay and Amazon have had APIs since the early 2000’s.  And now, more and more enterprises are developing API programs.   Large companies in industries as varied as retail (BestBuy), hardware (Cisco) and distribution (Coca-Cola Enterprises) are all creating successful API programs. 

Are you scrambling to finish (or start) your holiday shopping? Don’t worry! These apps can help you select, buy and save money on perfect gifts for your family and friends.

If you’re stumped about what to get your adolescent nephew, for example, El Gifto can make your life easier. The free app suggests presents based on age, gender, interests, and yes, even the recipient’s ego. It lets you set price limits too so you don’t accidentally fall in love with an $800 purse you never knew you needed.

On Friday, Part I of this series covered the broad strokes of what is one of the integration spaces’ pivotal annual gatherings, Gartner’s Application, Architecture Delivery and Integration Summit (AADI). This show sets the coming year’s tone for application integration at Fortune 500 companies, and to a degree for the integration space as a whole. At the last two shows, that tone has been spelled out clearly: A-P-I.

At Mashery we are very interested in the business of APIs (if you missed our Business of APIs conference earlier this fall, you should check out some videos of the sessions).  We love to talk about the benefits APIs bring to businesses all across different verticals.  From growing your brand awareness to internal development of new apps/products, APIs can make your business function better, faster and more efficiently.

About 122 million Americans are expected to shop online today, otherwise known as Cyber Monday, according to Shop.org, the digital division of The National Retail Federation, which coined the phrase in 2005. 

In the era of huge holiday sales Christmas starts earlier every year. With Thanksgiving this Thursday, retailers are gearing up for the now infamous Black Friday Sale, the busiest shopping day of the year.

It has been a busy year for API Management with lots of new players and new types of API products. What does it mean for APIs going into 2013? 

As a larger cross-section of businesses see the value of APIs, API management platforms will become even more important. Imperative to any API Management effort are five areas: design, documentation, analytics, access and uptime.

With the holiday shopping season close at hand (can you believe it’s here already), people are looking to make the smartest choices at checkout time, especially for higher priced items like electronics. Shopping shouldn’t be difficult, right? Often, when it comes to consumer electronics and their ilk, we mere mortals face tough calls about a few things when it’s time to put our money down: will it work properly? Am I buying the best product for my dollar? Does someone else have a cheaper version of what I’m looking for?

We’ve all read about tech superstars who dropped out of college or never bothered to go at all, before launching successful startups. In the real world it helps to know a little about what’s actually out there. 

Think Best Buy—a household name by any measure, the specialty retailer has a huge market share in sales of consumer electronics in the U.S., along with a growing presence in such regions as Canada and China. Now switch to Whit.li, a startup with a solution for SMB brand and social media managers to segment and engage social influencers in real time, based on demographics, rare interests, life-stage and personality.

With the economy (hopefully) starting to gain steam, hotels are starting to see some relief. Prices have been creeping back up over the last few years after the lows of 2008-2009. But hotel owners and managers still face the basic business dilemma – how do you get more revenue? The answer is obvious: fill more rooms! But how you fill those rooms is also important.

As you're packing for this week's Shop.org Annual Summit, it's useful to keep in mind how digitizing the retail experience for your business's consumers via APIs can really make your business stand out as an innovative and more influential player in the retail space. To help keep things in perspective before the show, we'll use Best Buy as a case-in-point example for how a traditionally brick-and-mortar store transformed its business model into one that has proven great success in this post-website era.

THE PROBLEM

Friday we reflected on multichannel expansion as a key business driver for retailers at eTail Boston this month, by comparing it to the technology recommendations of the analyst community. One fantastic point that Brian Walker touches on in his talk is that businesses in general cannot keep up with all of the emerging digital touch points in today’s market. Retailers are looking for strategies to reach customers across the rapidly growing array of channels most consumers touch daily: mobile, social, word of mouth, as well as traditional Web and traditional channels.