“A company without an API is like a computer without internet.
If I told you that I had a computer with the fastest processor and best display ever, but that it would never connect to the internet, you would likely consider it obsolete. That same label will soon be applied to companies without APIs that connect them with the rest of the digital world.” – Brian Koles, Head of Business Development at ChallengePost.
API (Application Programming Interface) is a set of rules and specifications that helps in accessing and using services and resources of a program and software that implements the API. API acts as interface between different software programmes and facilitates the interaction between them.
While a small percentage of specialists work with web APIs for several years, trying to expose their benefits, the big corporations start only now to realize the importance of this technology. Today the API model is the base of Cloud services and the core of the future interconnected businesses.
Companies like eBay started their efforts to develop web APIs 10 years ago, in an attempt to simplify the integration of their services by business partners, online search engines wanted to ease the integration in websites of maps and search services in order to increase the value of these services and, more recently, companies like Twitter (through Gnip) provide access to their data to create new sources of income. All are based on APIs developed on Web technologies.
The challenge to provide innovative products and services in a market that changes daily, force companies to find a way to an API model. Companies have much to learn from those who have been pioneers in this field, regardless of their size or industry. They can learn that an API can make their business prosper or collapse. Or, that the largest recipient of APIs can be their own development department. There is much to learn from the last 10 years changes in web development and mobile.
The most performant businesses have realized that the APIs that were initially seen as technical artifacts are now extremely valuable strategic business tools. Not only that they allow organizations to make available, in a controlled and standardized way, data and internal processes for general use, thereby increasing efficiency and agility within the company and partners ecosystem, but more, they may open their systems to the internal or external developer community, which can use familiar web development technologies to create new innovative products around these companies solutions.
An API standardizes the access to data and functionality, it accelerates and simplifies development, particularly now when the trend is to move businesses to cloud, mobile and social networks.
In other words, an API provides a simple and standardized way to unlock the digital assets value of a company and extend their availability to various integration and developments done by partners or independent developers. Then companies can use these developments to add even more value to their core assets in order to innovate or develop new business models.
SocrateCloud provides to system integrators and partners who want to develop new applications using the existing SocrateCloud platform and infrastructure, a powerful API, based on RESTful services, giving the possibility to query and create both entities like products, business partners, etc. and transactional documents (orders, invoices, receipts/payments, etc.). For more information on SocrateCloudAPI, please go to the dedicated website: https://sites.google.com/a/bitsoftware.ro/socratecloudapi/
