What is it that makes APIs interesting?

I work with a busi­ness unit at CA that’s all about APIs. Yet, so many peo­ple I talk to don’t real­ly under­stand why APIs mat­ter.

APIs mat­ter less because they enable inte­gra­tion and more because they sim­pli­fy it. Click To Tweet

I’ve been doing this ‘inte­gra­tion thing’ for a long time, at pre­mier com­pa­nies — TIBCO, Progress (Son­ic ESB), and Soft­ware AG (Web­meth­ods). At HIMSS the oth­er day, I saw a lot of com­pa­nies doing “work flow” and seam­less inte­gra­tion… things I’ve seen for a long time in pre­mier prod­ucts. I mean, the stuff I was see­ing at HIMSS was child­ish com­pared to what I’ve seen for a long time.

And, that’s exact­ly the point.

Any­one who’s been doing inte­gra­tion for a long time would look at a REST API and say/think — “We’ve been doing inte­gra­tion like that for a long time.”

They prob­a­bly have.

So it can’t be that API inte­gra­tion is inter­est­ing, inte­gra­tion has been hap­pen­ing for a long time.

Then what’s inter­est­ing about APIs? 

What’s inter­est­ing about APIs is the sim­plic­i­ty of API inte­gra­tion and the impli­ca­tions derived from that sim­plic­i­ty. Click To Tweet

It’s not just “faster time to mar­ket” or “low­er cost inte­gra­tion” but API sim­plic­i­ty affords peo­ple with less skill to do com­plex inte­gra­tion. While that’s scary it’s also an oppor­tu­ni­ty.

Each com­put­ing gen expands util­i­ty for nor­mal users by abstract­ing away con­trol for pow­er users. Already see­ing signs of that in ML-based UX

— Bene­dict Evans (@BenedictEvans) Feb­ru­ary 22, 2017

As Bene­dict says, the sim­plic­i­ty expands util­i­ty.

Shifting bottlenecks

If inte­gra­tion can be done by more peo­ple, more can get done… and the bot­tle­necks to devel­op­ment shift from the skills need­ed to do the inte­gra­tion to the skills need­ed to gov­ern the results of all the devel­op­ment using APIs that’s going to hap­pen.

That’s where API Man­age­ment comes in… API Man­age­ment enables, for exam­ple, secu­ri­ty pol­i­cy to be defined (by the secu­ri­ty or com­pli­ance offi­cer) and then imple­ment­ed in the infra­struc­ture fur­ther sim­pli­fy­ing the devel­op­er expe­ri­ence to expand util­i­ty.

Sim­i­lar­ly, devel­op­er man­age­ment and ana­lyt­ics becomes impor­tant. Who’s doing what, where, and what SLA’s are they get­ting?

When you real­ize the pow­er that APIs being used by the “mass­es” brings, you’ll want to cre­ate more APIs faster, and cre­ate those APIs con­sis­tent­ly (and again, per­haps with less skill need­ed by the devel­op­er cre­at­ing the API). To address this, CA offers Live API Cre­ator.

A great, if triv­ial, exam­ple of the ben­e­fits of look­ing at inte­gra­tion through this new lens of sim­plic­i­ty can be shared with some­thing we and a part­ner did using the CA FHIR Devel­op­er Por­tal. A part­ner wished to high­light their health­care exper­tise at CA World.

We have the plat­form in the devel­op­er por­tal so the part­ner cre­at­ed a mobile app that shows off their exper­tise, with­out need­ing to build (or main­tain) a health­care plat­form. CA man­ages the plat­form so the part­ner didn’t need to build a whole back end just to show off a mobile app. We man­age the SLA’s, the secu­ri­ty, etc. But we didn’t have to write the app. They devel­oped some busi­ness use cas­es that show off their health­care exper­tise in a mean­ing­ful way, but didn’t have to sweat the details of pol­i­cy based secu­ri­ty, rapid API inte­gra­tion, or secure doc­u­ment shar­ing and col­lab­o­ra­tion (that’s built into the app with just ~30 days of devel­op­ment!).

Pri­or to APIs, this sort of inte­gra­tion was pos­si­ble, but we (CA) would have had to be way more hands on with the part­ner’s devel­op­er (and there would like­ly have been more than one devel­op­er). We would have had to build a silo to the patient record sys­tem, and we couldn’t reuse a lot of that work. Now, any part­ner that wants to cre­ate a mobile health­care app can start the way the part­ner did — with our health­care devel­op­er por­tal.

Every­one wins and the util­i­ty of what’s deliv­ered to the cus­tomer expands, just as Bene­dict so clear­ly artic­u­lat­ed in a sim­ple tweet.