API Trends: What to expect in 2012 »

Thanks to all who participated in last week's webinar:  "API Trends: What to expect in 2012" with Sam @sramji, Anant @jhingran, and Brian @brianpagno.

Here are the video and slides. Thanks for a great interactive session.

We'd love to hear more of your thoughts and questions; please join the conversation on the api-craft forum.

Engage customers where they are - at the edge of your enterprise »

Wayne Gretzky has this great quote -
A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.

A few days ago I had a great conversation with a big retailer (and with many other customers since then) about engaging customers on the edge of the enterprise and think it's worth sharing.

Today our systems of record in enterprises are ERP and billing systems. That will continue to be the case but the problem is that all these systems of record represent where the puck has already been - what has already happened.

We'd like to predict where the puck is going to be. Today, lots of information can be gathered and analyzed quickly, and in real-time. So you can know what your customer is doing right now. Based on what they are doing now, or have just done, you can predict what they will do, or want to do next.

We're talking about figuring out how to play where the puck is going.
Imagine, you are a leading retailer. A customer walks into your retail location. If they check in (Foursquare, Facebook, Google+, . .  on their mobile device), and you have their credentials, you can know their profile and recent history.  

Where have they been? Did they just leave Walmart or Tiffany? Their spending patterns will obviously be different.

Can you know from their Twitter stream whether they were grocery shopping or anniversary shopping? Knowing this, and correlating it with what they've already bought from you, gives you a perspective and clues to their intent.

Imagine if you can make this information available to a sales person on the spot? Now you've provided that sales person a context in which to interact with the customer. They're equipped to provide a great and customized experience.

The only way to make this happen is if your enterprise is interacting with all of the different streams of data that are available and correlating this data with what you already have inside the enterprise.

Use it all - data in the core enterprise, from outside the enterprise and most importantly from the edge of the enterprise (mostly mobile apps) - to make context-sensitive interactions for customers.

That's what engaging customers on the edge is.

Yin and Yang of APIs and the Cloud - Part 2 »

In a recent post I talked about how you need APIs as your business grows; how services need to integrate directly to a companies' business processes through APIs rather than indirectly through a portal or Web site. Check it out here.

This time, because APIs need to scale, I talk about how you need the Cloud to effectively manage those APIs and enable developers to be successful using your APIs to build their apps.

You need a cloud to effectively manage your APIs.

Let's start by comparing API usage in the traditional enterprise scenario with API usage in the growing API economy around social and mobile applications.

In a traditional enterprise model it takes years to build out the enterprise ecosystem of apps and the life span of an app is often measured in decades. Traditional enterprise apps connected to back-end systems are typically designed to carefully shrink and grow their IT capacity. Change is slow, IT requirements are predictable but capacity needs to be available to support maximum loads.

In the new API economy - in a world of mobile and social apps development - we're working in an environment of rapid innovation and a usage model in which we cannot predict or preconfigure capacity. IT needs are not as predictable as in the traditional model. Burstiness or spikes in requests happen as a result of a number of things: API access and usage changes from within apps, app users come and go, apps can get popular for a few weeks, create a surge in demand, then subside.  It's a rapidly changing environment in which you need to be able to scale and respond to rapid bursts of requests that create periods of peak system usage.

Hosting your APIs in the cloud offers the ability to provision and deprovision as needed. In other words, you can avoid spending at the peak rate - rather spend at an average rate and take advantage of cloud elasticity and burst as required in times of peak load. Several enterprise API customers already leverage the Cloud for variable capacity.

Should the cloud be internal or external to your business? Inside or outside your firewall?

Unless your app developers and the APIs they leverage are entirely within the walls of your enterprise, I recommend that your APIs are hosted in a cloud outside your firewall. There are a few reasons:

- The developers who will use your APIs - your audience -  are external to your enterprise and supporting these developers is priority.

- Those developers are familiar with using public APIs. Developers are busy building social and mobile apps meaning that they're comfortable in an environment in which they connect to public APIs offered by Facebook, Twitter, Twilio, SimpleGeo, and so on. 

- It is common for developers to use more than one provider's API in building their apps. If APIs are behind your firewall, you make it more difficult for developers to access those APIs as they need to navigate different firewalls and different back-end systems for the different APIs they want to use. This will adversely impact developer adoption of your APIs. 

In summary, you need a Cloud to be able to scale and respond to the dynamic nature of today's API-driven apps. The Cloud should be on the Web outside your enterprise firewall to effectively support your customers - app developers.