Cisco

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I recently discussed what data/content enterprises can open up to the public through APIs.  This week, I want to discuss the customer and/or partner API tier.  This tier covers data that is too important to the enterprise to be made public, but is very useful to its customers and/or partners. 

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.

Here at Mashery, we believe in the transformative nature of APIs.  We hear from our customers and partners every day about the power of APIs to build new business models, new partnerships and new channels.  This fall, our Business of APIs (BAPI) conferences, gave us the opportunity to highlight our customers and how APIs transformed their business. 

ESPN and Cisco provided great examples. Summaries of their presentations are below, but I encourage you to watch the videos in their entirety (links below). 

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. 

Talk of the cloud has been around for several years now.  Up to know, however, the majority of cloud usage has come from “transformational companies” (11% of companies accounted for 44% of cloud adoption in 2010).  This is beginning to change, however. 

For those of you who are fortunate to be in Las Vegas this week at Gartner's Application Architecture Delivery and Integration (AADI) Summit, you may have heard the news, as word of what CIOs want is starting to filter into conversations. Some key things we hear are that mobile, cloud, social and information analytics are more important than ever.

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.