During the holidays I was catching up on some articles sent my way that I had saved over the fall using Instapaper and came across this one from Techcrunch: 5 Rules for API Management. It’s a great short read (including the comments) and the 5 “rules” are Design, Documentation, Analytics, Universal Access, and Uptime. It reminded me of a post I wrote in late June calling for a continued push for Open APIs in our industry. It’s great to see a blog like Techcrunch covering the need and importance of APIs in the software industry.
APIs are what make the Internet so connected and powerful in these social days. Great APIs make software products so incredibly useful and flexible for their user base. APIs also help software companies expand the value of their products by leveraging the benefits of other products connected to them. It’s a teamwork type environment instead of the old “proprietary” days of the past where software customers were tied into one system and were literally at the mercy of those systems’ new features and improvements.
In the MSP Industry having a well built APIs is a relatively new and rapidly developing idea. Most of the core vendors now have some sort of API but unfortunately most of them, if not all, have some deficiency. These deficiencies are unexplained usability issues (random timeouts), poor documentation, or just lack of data available through them. Things are getting better and you can see the change at IT Nation with so many new companies offering great add-ons thanks to Connectwise’s API.
There is much more these core vendors can be doing to futher enhance and promote their open APIs that ultimately will help MSPs and provide more flexibility. They could be providing more and more data available through their API, they could really promote their development communities to their partners, and they could provide better support to these third party products, etc. I encourage all MSPs to continue to bring these points up through their support channels and user forums as stronger APIs mean better products to help MSPs perform their business faster, more profitably, and with less system headaches. In speaking with many MSPs, these are all top concerns.
Stronger APIs is one area everyone can improve so lets push for them!!