When it comes to mobile computing IT organizations basically have two choices. They can either try to extend their existing applications to support mobile computing access or they can develop applications from the ground up that are truly optimized for mobile computing.
Backupify, a leading backup and recovery solutions provider for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, has just announced the launch of the Backupify Developer Program which includes a suite of APIs that allow SaaS application developers to integrate data backup and restore capabilities into their applications.
One of the great things about APIs is that they make applications more accessible than ever in the age of the cloud. But just because an application is accessible doesn’t necessarily mean there is a mechanism in place to consume data from the application via the API it exposes. In fact, the tools needed to consume that data is giving rise to a new class of middleware that is collectively being referred to as cloud brokering software.
In a post over at PandoDaily last week there was some discussion about the trend towards Single Page Web Applications (SPAs) that seems to be emerging especially for SAAS Web Applications (see Zendesk’s great post on Techcrunch last week). Single Page Web Apps are just starting to gain currency, but may end up playing a major role in API adoption since they essentially eliminate the need for “page based” navigation within an application. Instead, SPAs rely on a combination of an API and Javascript to create the user experience. It also seems likely that this trend might eventually extend even to content Web sites, not just functional applications (some thoughts on this here: The Death of the Web Page.
There’s no doubt that an application becomes exponentially more valuable as the number of data sources it connects to increases. The challenge is managing that process. While the rise of application programming interfaces that make it simpler to invoke another application has dramatically increased the usefulness of application software, trying to manually manage that process via a series of point-to-point connections winds up being overly cumbersome.
3Scale, a leading Plug and Play SaaS API Management platform and services provider, has just announced the launch of a new Open Source API Proxy that provides Enterprises API traffic management on-premises and in the cloud.
Nimble, a social CRM and SaaS provider, has just announced the launch of a new Contact API and App Marketplace making it possible for developers to create engaging third-party applications using the Nimble platform.
When it comes to applications the end user experience reigns supreme. No matter how good the underlying business logic might be; if the end user experience is cumbersome the usage of the application naturally starts to drop off. Unfortunately, patience with applications is in short supply. In a Web 2.0 world people expect an application to be fairly intuitive. Alas, every end user has a different definition of intuitive so it’s hard for developers to make every user perfectly happy.
Microsoft as expected last week announced that it would be integrating its Yammer social networking and Skype unified communications services with Microsoft Dynamics CRM software. This week Microsoft took that effort a step further via an alliance with Moxie Software under which another social networking application for the enterprise is being integrated within Microsoft Dynamics.
Mashery, a leader in API Management platforms and a ProgrammableWeb sponsor, has announced that a new version of the Mashery API Management platform has been released and a reseller partnership has been established with Intel.
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