Today everything has an API. Facebook has hundreds of APIs across such social areas as friends, photos, likes and events. Google has thousands of APIs across search/AdWords, Web analytics, YouTube, maps, email and many more. Amazon has APIs that cover the spectrum from Alexa Web traffic rankings to e-commerce product and pricing information and even the ability to start and stop individual machines. I spent a decade architecting and building component and services based software, and another decade after that evaluating and investing in infrastructure software, I believe this mobile and cloud influenced wave of RESTful service-oriented software may finally live up to its initial promise.
Although the majority of API attention has centered on consumer Web services, an emerging cadre of startups are focused on infrastructure and business processes. These newcomers are providing a broad range of critical services neatly packaged as frameworks or APIs. Some of these companies, such as Salesforce and Google Maps, are next generation SaaS providers that have built solutions to serve both end users and developers. Others, including Mailchimp and Twilio, are pure play offerings that solely target developers as customers.
Open source helped to reignite the open systems movement in the late 1990s, which popularized the idea of creating public projects and actively soliciting community feedback and involvement. Tens of thousands of open source projects have been created, but only those projects that built sizable communities have thrived. Most of the large infrastructure software categories were eventually filled by strong open source projects and some spawned successful commercial software companies, including RedHat, XenSource, Sourcefire, MySQL, JBoss, Talend and Alfresco. These companies span a broad range — from operating systems/hypervisors to security to middleware and database/content management.Continue Reading
