Great blog post by John Musser on a recent panel at Interop.
API’s are definitely becoming mainstream. It is certainly mainstream for web companies. So why not SaaS companies ?
SaaS providers serve different customers. As SaaS has become more mainstream (accepted by fortune 2000) customers, the need for API’s has grown – firstly for integration and secondly to build customer apps. The need for integration has been solved by SaaS integration vendors like CastIron building adapters, but having been in that business for a long time, I know they could use standard APIs from the vendors.
The need for custom applications is also increasing as customers are building composite applications that use data stored in their ERP (on-premise), CRM (on-line) and web 2.0 applications like Google maps.
But at the end of the day SaaS vendors will provide the API’s for 3 reasons:-
1. competitive differentiation – customers ask for it when evaluating similar SaaS providers
2. increase stickiness – to embed themselves in a customer’s enterprise applications
3. new revenue stream – as an add-on MRR (monthly recurring revenue) source.
These are compelling reasons! API’s are becoming mainstream and yes, almost all SaaS vendors need to have an API.
(And of course, once you have one, API management becomes important to differentiate your service and customer sat..)
