I am a big proponent of APIs (application programming interfaces). Many of you might think that I must have a sick sense of humor, but I am seriously excited about this topic. We have finally moved to a new era where software development is moving away from trying to build colossal solutions that take years to implement and are hard to use. I gave an example of this in one of my previous blog posts how PowerObjects have been able to solve a business problem for me.
I am a true believer in assembling solutions of top-of-the-breed solutions and not trying to reinvent the wheel. If you felt a pinch in your heart, you should think about this and how you develop your software within your organization. Are you building things that already exist or are you building things that provide value-add to the overall solution based on your own core competence? I have led development teams an built more than 30 international software products with my teams, so I know what it means.
Application programming interfaces (APIs) can change your business and is a way for you to transform your business. It enables smart developers to create functional entities (consumable services) that can become a part of a larger entity. You do not have to go far to understand that quite a few companies have taken this approach such as Facebook etc. What is interesting is that APIs do not have to be only tied to external connections (messaging across organizations), but some large organizations are executing on effective API strategy within the company firewall. I truly think that the massive “one-fits-all” era is gone and the new era will be more about how you become part of your own ecosystem.
What we are seeing when working with large ISVs is the trend to not try to replace the old legacy solution, but to simulate a start-up by creating a MVP (Minimal Viable Product) that can meet the requirements of “good enough” for the end users. I think we have really come to the end of an era where more functionality is better, people do not have time to learn and re-learn things that should be self-explanatory. I am very excited about this MVP approach and will be writing more about this in my upcoming posts. I think this gives a new opportunity for legacy vendors to be competing towards new market entrants than every before.
I am excited about the potential with software, software apps and the cloud. I have been in the business for more than 20 years (hard to admit) and I feel like a young boy with the opportunities at hand. I like to challenge my brain (and keep myself relevant) by developing solutions and last weekend I spent customizing our internal Dynamics CRM 2011 Online instance to include the ability to collect information of TELLUS Academy students and also how to integrate all of this with our SharePoint 2013 Online instance. All of these are of course cloud-enabled and can be used from anywhere, anytime and independent of device. I set the objective in 2005 when I founded TELLUS to NOT have any servers that everything had to be surfaced from the cloud. Think back to 2005 and you will realize that there were not that many native cloud applications at the time.
If you are in the software business, you should look at the opportunities around apps and how you can build something exciting using the cloud. Unfortunately many organizations tend to think that creating an app has only to do with smart phones, but there is much more into apps than that. The app is just the “window to a service” that lives in the cloud and the user gets the benefit of this from many perspective such as scalability. I has been fun to see many organizations going into this direction with Windows Azure as backbone for the cloud services and Windows apps as the foundation. Windows Azure supports other mobile technologies such as Android and iOS as well.
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