Mark O'Neill

The Power of Real-Time APIs - Apple Watch and BMW One of the most exciting parts of this week's Apple Watch launch was the example of the BMW watch app. This app allows you to see the charging status of your BMWi electric car, right from your wrist. You can also check the status of the doors of your car (important information such as if they are locked or not!). Although the star of the show was the watch app, APIs had a cameo appearance, since the information shown on the watch is fetched in real-time from APIs. It happens that there is already an example of a watch app for BMIs cars, pulling data in real-time from APIs. If you want to find more about the underlying APIs, check out the Axway/IC-Consult webinar about how APIs power the connected car. As you can see below, not only are watch apps involved (in this case the Samsung Gear example), but also mobile apps. The... (more)

API Workshops roll on - Detroit / Connected Car - and next stop Munich June 10

Last Tuesday in Detroit, along with IC-Consult, Axway ran an API Workshop in Detroit. Many attendees from the major car companies were present. One of the big conversation topics was Social Login ("Login with Google", etc). This is something which we saw can be implemented using the Axway API Gateway, and in fact the API Gateway can be used to map from a Social Login to a local on-premises Identity and Access Management product like Oracle Access Manager (here's a description of the Google to Oracle OAM mapping in action). That allows for a hybrid Cloud/On-Premises identity appro... (more)

Rise of the Thing - Internet of Things

Here are some predictions for the API space for 2014: Rise of the Client It's generally agreed that an API is only as good as the clients which use it. An unused API is a failure. So that's why it's odd that so much attention has focused on the server side of APIs, with comparatively little attention paid to the client side (there are exceptions though, like Runscope's handy Request Editor and hurl.it, to help developer API clients). If you ask an API provider about how their API is going to be called by clients, often you are met with a hand-wavy answer along the lines of "It's RE... (more)

APIdentity at Cloud Identity Summit next week

My colleague Ross Garrett is speaking next week at the Cloud Identity Summit on the "APIdentity" track. "APIdentity" is a neat mashup of "API" and "Identity" - I like it. Catch Ross's talk at 2.10pm on Monday 21 July: API Security for the Cloud: Tales from the Trenches Cloud technologies and mobile devices are transforming interactions with organizations via APIs. APIs present an endless opportunity for businesses to generate revenue, engage customers and collaborate with partners; Gartner even predicts 50% of B2B collaboration will occur via Web APIs by 2016. This API Economy create... (more)

API Workshop in Detroit - Tuesday 24 June - Connected Car, OAuth, Office365, SalesForce.com, and more

Next Tuesday, June 24, in conjunction with our partners at IC-Consult, we are running a half-day API Workshop in the Detroit area. I'm very excited that we have a great guest speaker, Robert Foster from IC-Consult, who will be talking about about the BMW Group case study, explaining how secure APIs drive innovation in the Connected Car area.  In the technical deep dive part of the API Workshop, we'll be covering:How to secure REST APIs - OAuth 2.0 and moreAPIs for Mobile Apps SalesForce.com and other Cloud APIsMicrosoft Office365 and Google Apps Single Sign-OnIt's also a great op... (more)