The Internet of Things has the potential to disrupt all industries, not just consumer, as businesses leverage the new insights and capabilities enabled by new devices / things, automation, integration and analytics, etc., to transform how they do business.
One industry ripe for disruption is higher education. Colleges and universities are being challenged with serving more students and at the same time ensuring successful student outcomes.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Chris Witeck, Principa...| By Sal Visca | Article Rating: |
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| December 30, 2013 09:45 AM EST | Reads: |
7,041 |
Slide Deck from Sal Visca's Cloud Expo® Presentation: Business APIs in the Cloud
Everyone talks about a cloud-first or mobile-first strategy. It's the trend du jour, and for good reason as these innovative technologies have revolutionized an industry and made savvy companies a lot of money. But consider for a minute what's emerging with the Age of Context and the Internet of Things. Devices, interfaces, everyday objects are becoming endowed with computing smarts. This is creating an unprecedented focus on the Application Programming Interface (API) as developers seek to connect these devices and interfaces to create new supporting services and hybrids. I call this trend the move toward an API-first business model and strategy.

At Elastic Path we've been talking about API-first for a few years, and we believe it's really about opening up your system and recognizing that APIs are going to be the main point of contact for all digital businesses. An API-first strategy is the new business imperative of our time.
Unified APIs Drive Great Digital Experiences
Customers are increasingly using digital touchpoints to interact with brands every day. For example, a consumer might be discovering, researching, buying, managing, or contributing to products and services. As more brands make a complete shift to digital, both marketing and technology professionals have come to the realization that digital customer experience is both an urgent priority and a key growth factor.
This transition to digital is also sweeping IT organizations away from their traditional role as a cost center and supporting resource to being front and center as a driver of customer-facing innovation and growth. Although these roles are new to many IT executives, they are having a significant impact on how they think and act. Like their counterparts who report to the CMO, a great percentage of professionals who work for the CTO appreciate the strategic importance of a great digital customer experience.
In a recent commissioned study, Forrester Consulting found that two-thirds of survey respondents said that unifying platform capabilities into a consistent set of APIs will be the key to unleashing business growth and to delivering great digital experiences.
This belief in the value of unified APIs persists even when considering specific industry scenarios. Take ecommerce for example - a well-understood digital experience paradigm where multiple applications power a wide variety of touchpoints. Sixty-six percent of respondents said they believe that a unified service layer represents the best approach. When a more ambiguous use case is suggested - driving digital experiences from a content management, CEM, or DXM platform - a unified service layer against is the ideal strategy, with a majority of survey respondents continuing to favor it.
Unified APIs eliminate the challenges that are symptomatic of the big bottleneck. They are an ideal solution for companies that are striving for a great digital customer experience.
The Language of Business
Indeed, APIs are coming into the mainstream. I've been in this industry for more than 20 years and we've always had APIs in some form or another. There's always been a way to communicate between systems. From a technical perspective, what's changing now is really the protocols between systems and how they're improving. The APIs that developers are working with today are much more focused on what I call the "Language of Business." For example, if you want to build an application for a mobile device, a modern API can help you do that without you having to know all about the underlying back-end systems. All you need to do is focus on creating a great user experience.
At Elastic Path, we're trying to reinvent the API by focusing on the needs of the business and abstract away all of the back-end complexity. We're on a mission to develop a better API, which we call Cortex. We call it Cortex because it's an intelligent API. It's intelligent because it does something no other API does: Cortex completely decouples client applications from business platforms, yet enhances their ability to securely retrieve data and perform transactions. This breakthrough API technology gives designers, developers, and API consumers the unprecedented freedom they need to create unique digital experiences. Once abstracted, these resources - from any source - are linked together to generate Cortex Business APIs that securely project your unified services to the world.
Developers Matter
Developers are a big deal. It's the developers who are building apps and making money on the Apple App Store, the Google Play store, and other online marketplaces. All of a sudden, the developer is cool again (if you're a developer, you already knew this). And Elastic Path thinks that's a great thing. We're trying to enable and empower the API-first developer with powerful tools, such as Cortex.
But developers aren't superhuman. Often, they have to spend weeks learning how to use a specific API, teach their code how to communicate with a system, often without a guarantee of success. Developer productivity, it turns out, is a very significant priority. That's why I think developers need tools to build very rich, high-engaging applications without having to know a lot about an underlying system.
The cloud computing landscape also plays an important part in an API-first strategy. Deploying your API to the cloud enables a streamlined approach and central control. Consider this scenario: A developer writes a client application that calls an API that's hosted in the cloud environment, but that API goes off and reaches back behind the corporate firewall to get data that you were authorized to retrieve. Perhaps it hits a public database. What's happening is that the API is federated across multiple systems. This is a big change from the old days when a developer would be forced to know all of the specific ins and outs of a system, how the back-end functionality works. That antiquated method really put the onus on the developer to figure it all out. That's all changed now, thanks to cloud computing and API-first strategies. With APIs available in the cloud environment, it's much easier for the developer to access and aggregate back-end complexity.
Armed with an API-first strategy, we are going to see a whole new generation of business-focused developers who are not your traditional software developers. Imagine the innovation that will come when you can push this innovation to the edge and start to open up new types of business models. I think that's really going to bring some amazing innovation in the market.
Published December 30, 2013 Reads 7,041
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More Stories By Sal Visca
Sal Visca is the Chief Technology Officer at Elastic Path Software. He has over 24 years of experience developing long-term technology strategies, understanding emerging markets and technologies, and bringing new consumer and business solutions to market. He is responsible for developing Elastic Path's long-term technology strategies and bringing new enterprise e-commerce solutions to market.
The Internet of Things has the potential to disrupt all industries, not just consumer, as businesses leverage the new insights and capabilities enabled by new devices / things, automation, integration and analytics, etc., to transform how they do business.
One industry ripe for disruption is higher education. Colleges and universities are being challenged with serving more students and at the same time ensuring successful student outcomes.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Chris Witeck, Principa...Jan. 22, 2016 12:15 AM EST Reads: 695 |
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For it to be SOA – let alone SOA done right – we need to pin down just what "SOA done wrong" might be. First-generation SOA with Web Services and ESBs, perhaps?
But then there's second-generation, REST-based SOA. More lightweight and cloud-friendly, but many REST-based SOA practices predate the microservices wave.
Today, microservices and containers go hand in hand – only the details of "container-oriented architecture" are largely on the drawing board – and are not likely to look much like S...
With containerization using Docker, the orchestration of containers using Kubernetes, the self-service model for provisioning your projects and applications and the workflows we built in OpenShift is the best in class Platform as a Service that enables introducing DevOps into your organization with ease.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Veer Muchandi, PaaS evangelist with RedHat, provided a deep dive overview of OpenShift v3 and demonstrated how it helps with DevOps.
Enterprises require the performance, agility and on-demand access of the public cloud, and the management, security and compatibility of the private cloud. The solution? In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Simone Brunozzi, VP and Chief Technologist(global role) for VMware, will explore how to unlock the power of the hybrid cloud and the steps to get there. He'll discuss the challenges that conventional approaches to both public and private cloud computing, and outline the tough decisions that mus...
Your business relies on your applications and your employees to stay in business. Whether you develop apps or manage business critical apps that help fuel your business, what happens when users experience sluggish performance? You and all technical teams across the organization – application, network, operations, among others, as well as, those outside the organization, like ISPs and third-party providers – are called in to solve the problem.
Predictive analytics tools monitor, report, and troubleshoot in order to make proactive decisions about the health, performance, and utilization of storage. Most enterprises combine cloud and on-premise storage, resulting in blended environments of physical, virtual, cloud, and other platforms, which justifies more sophisticated storage analytics.
In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Peter McCallum, Vice President of Datacenter Solutions at FalconStor, will discuss using predictive analytics to ...
At year-end, we often consider where we’ve fallen short over the last twelve months – and how we can do better over the next twelve. For IT leaders, DevOps is likely to be a primary concern for 2016. As application awesomeness becomes more important to the business, IT must get great code into production faster. DevOps success is thus imperative – especially if you’re competing against digital-first market disrupters.
DevOps, though, isn’t just about engineering better processes. It’s also abou...
The Microservices architectural pattern promises increased DevOps agility and can help enable continuous delivery of software. This session is for developers who are transforming existing applications to cloud-native applications, or creating new microservices style applications.
In his session at 17th Cloud Expo, Jim Bugwadia, CEO of Nirmata, introduced best practices, patterns, challenges, and solutions for the development and operations of microservices style applications. He discussed how a...
NHK, Japan Broadcasting, will feature the upcoming @ThingsExpo Silicon Valley in a special 'Internet of Things' and smart technology documentary that will be filmed on the expo floor between November 3 to 5, 2015, in Santa Clara. NHK is the sole public TV network in Japan equivalent to the BBC in the UK and the largest in Asia with many award-winning science and technology programs. Japanese TV is producing a documentary about IoT and Smart technology and will be covering @ThingsExpo Silicon Val...
SYS-CON Events announced today that AppNeta, the leader in performance insight for business-critical web applications, will exhibit and present at SYS-CON's @DevOpsSummit at Cloud Expo New York, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
AppNeta is the only application performance monitoring (APM) company to provide solutions for all applications – applications you develop internally, business-critical SaaS applications you use and the networks that deli...
SYS-CON Events announced today that eCube Systems, the leading provider of modern development tools and best practices for Continuous Integration on OpenVMS, will exhibit at SYS-CON's @DevOpsSummit at Cloud Expo New York, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
eCube Systems offers a family of middleware products and development tools that maximize return on technology investment by leveraging existing technical equity to meet evolving business needs....
SYS-CON Events announced today that Fusion, a leading provider of cloud services, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 18th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Fusion, a leading provider of integrated cloud solutions to small, medium and large businesses, is the industry's single source for the cloud. Fusion's advanced, proprietary cloud service platform enables the integration of leading edge solutions in the cloud, including clou...
SYS-CON Events announced today that Interface Masters Technologies, a leading vendor in the network monitoring and high speed networking markets, will exhibit at the 18th International CloudExpo®, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, and the 19th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 1–3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
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In a recent weekend edition of the #CIOChat tweetchat, the question was raised about what the CIO's role would look like in five years. The discussion focused on many different areas. One area was that the CIO would become more of a service broker, as more and more applications move to the cloud. The responsibility discussion becomes less about controlling / owning iron / hardware / space, which has been the traditional area of CIO responsibilities. This prompted a secondary question from me: Has the cloud industry reached the point where it is too big to fail? Granted none of the big players ...
As smart cars, pre-loaded with millions of lines of code, are becoming the norm in the automotive industry, the topic of safety has come to the forefront of the conversation in a big way. Most consumers remember several large-scale recalls in the past few years, and it’s left some a bit wary of software glitches that could affect driver safety.
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Could we really get ourselves to the point where we regard the cloud layer as our first, primary, default and de facto location for data? The answer is: yes, we do already… although perhaps not all of us have even realized it yet.
When we do start to fully appreciate what the cloud computing layer of data storage and application services can really do for us, we will find ourselves almost ‘set free’ from our previous notions of how we use the computers, laptops, tablets and smartphones that we rega...
Understanding the core objective is alone not enough to find greater success with content marketing. The reason very few marketers find their content marketing strategies effective is because of the lack of personalization.
Content marketing is everywhere and it is not going away anytime soon. A survey conducted by IDC found that CMOs at some of the biggest technological companies in the world regarded building content marketing competency as the second most important initiative in their organizations just behind ROI. Yet, as another study from the CMO council shows, less than 2 percent of ma...


























