Lots of parallels to draw with what is happening with cloud computing and the API economy.

Faster computation: Cloud computing is crushing the time to provision servers from weeks to minutes, and converting prohibitive capital investment into low operating expense.

Quicker Access: Metcalfe’s law is working in APIs… as companies like TrueCredit.com open their apps and make it very quick/easy to consume their services; the value of what they provide grows quickly with each new connection.

Shorter decision cycles: If you are running a business, assume that your biggest competitors are working on opening APIs to their data and apps.  You don’t want read about their API announcement and at that moment be behind.  Else you are the next Chicago Tribune.

Favorite part – they ask the question -  “how do we control this increasingly out-of-control, interlinked world?

Answer?  “online surge-protectors to stop run-ups and panics” and “better analytics”   – exactly how we describe Sonoa API Management

Business Drivers:
SOA and APIs are very different. They start from very different points with different end goals and most importantly originated by very different people. SOA is a technology approach, one with very sound computer science principles, all of which will get adopted. These projects are mostly originated by architects. API projects on the other hand are driven mostly by product managers. As their applications are getting more adoption they see a new revenue source, new way to satisfy customer demand by making APIs available.

Technology:
SOA and API are different – simplicity and scale. most SOA is based on Web services standards that solve every corner case known to mankind. Complexity increase with flexibility. APIs are mostly REST based. We see this change with our enterprise customers, many of them are adopting REST/Web API approach to solve their SOA projects. Secondly is scale. The same difference that we see in classic enterprise and Web computing software shows up here.

As Dion says there is value in applying API principles to SOA projects:
- Ease of use – as discussed above simplicity make a lot of sense.
- Self Service – as one makes things simple, using non-confidential or classified services/APIs should be easy – not calling 14 people and getting 20 approvals.
- Visibility/reporting – this is important for both the consumer and provider.

Not sure account management, developer community and licenses apply to internal enterprise projects or for that matter for API projects, but that is for another blog.

Cloud computing is bringing simplicity and scale requirements into focus for the enterprise and these differences are getting closer. As always Dion’s pictures/drawing are awesome.

At Sonoa we completely agree with Jonathan’s assessment. As with all inflections points, we will only know after we have passed it, but it certainly fees like we have either reached or close to reaching a maturation/tipping point.

Sonoa provides visibility, control and scale for APIs, feeds and services. We provide this on premise and on demand. In addition to the technology discussions, increasingly we have two kinds of requests from our customers: 1. API strategy – what are the different phases of an API strategy, should I just make them available and see what happens, etc., and 2. API Development – what best practices does one use in order to have simple to use and scalable APIs. As Jonathan points out in his blog creative/media agencies will be of little help. Maybe there is an opportunity for boutique SI firms or for large consulting firms to start a practice.

“Cloud computing” contains the seeds of IT’s next generation – YES. This is real, much like client server and Web computing… in fact probably has benefits of both – cost and revenue.

Cloud’s customers (slide #16) – great customer segmentation. would like to add that almost all enterprise customers are using cloud for revenue or customer service related projects and using time to market/costs as the major drivers.

The systems vendors will not dominate (slide #22). This one requires a double take. James makes the point that for a vendor to succeed, it requires operations excellence in Web scale data center operations and system companies have expertise in managing enterprise data centers – wrong skills. This may seem like Wow! comment for many have not been through this, but for anybody who has built, deployed and managed enterprise apps. vs. Web apps they know the difference. The mindset is very different. The smart vendors are aware of this and will either focus on their sweet spot or acquire/grow into this space.

Security is a problem for IT departments that we keep hearing about again and again – Ogren’s is an interesting and practical take on the issue. Forrester created a checklist of security requirements for any company hosting/opening APIs via the cloud. It’s crucial to execute “due diligence” and upkeep with cloud infrastructure in order to ensure security.

The operational and business consultant sides of the CIO won’t necessarily separate as Gray indicates. Yes, a lot of operational aspects are handled for you when you move to the cloud, but there is still very real work to be done in maintaining security and control in the cloud that is directly related to C-level business efforts. No doubt we’ll see the position of the CIO evolve, but the role is still vital to business & IT operations.

Yes, security is a concern when you move to the cloud, but not every API operation in the enterprise needs stringent regulations. There are many enterprise applications that require collaboration with the extended value chain – not every operation has sensitive data. Because of cost and time to market issues it may be easier to do these operations in the cloud.