This article first appeared on Forbes on February 12, 2012

APIs: A Strategy Guide

For most of the past year, I have worked with two brilliant experts on APIs, Daniel Jacobson, at Netflix and Greg Brail, CTO of Apigee, to create a book that clearly explains the value of APIs. In researching the book, APIs: A Strategy Guide, we talked to dozens of other smart people who had led the creation of APIs for both internal and external use.

One of the most striking findings was how often API programs were started in secret, nurtured by the true believers in a clandestine way, slipped into production, and then brought to the awareness of senior management after the API was shown to be a success.

This pattern is understandable but ridiculous. Our book is an attempt to obviate this pattern by providing a top-to-bottom reference for people who want to understand the business value of APIs. But we are not naive. We know that the most likely people to read our book are also true believers and innovators who are already open to new ideas. The trick to accelerating the adoption of APIs and reaping the massive value they can create, is to convince skeptics. At some point, that means convincing the CEO, who, if sold on the idea, can bring all the resources of the organization to bear. APIs have been proven over and over to be a transformative force. It is time for technology leaders to force the issue. So, get yourself a meeting with your CEO and have a conversation along the following lines.

The Business Basics of APIs

When a CEO looks at the calendar entry for your meeting, he or she will likely think, “My god, this seems a bit technical for me. Shouldn’t the CIO or CTO be handling this?” So your first job is to make sure that the CEO understands that APIs are huge channels for business. Start the conversation by pointing out these facts:

APIs are not experimental: More than half of all the traffic to major companies like Twitter and eBay come through APIs

• APIs are channel to new customers and markets: APIs used externally unlock the power of partners to use business assets to extend the reach of your products or services to customers and markets you may not easily reach.
• APIs can be private: Much of the talk about APIs emphasizes their public use. Internal APIs should be part of every companies IT strategy.
• APIs promote innovation: Through an API, people who are passionate about a problem can solve it on their own.
• APIs are a better way to organize IT: APIs used internally can accelerate innovation by allowing everyone in a company to use each others assets without having to wait around for permission.
• APIs are not only for huge companies: The technology is standardized and able to be used by companies of all sizes.
• APIs create a path to lots of Apps: Apps are powered by APIs. When developers are motivated, they can use APIs and combinations of APIs to create new experiences for end users.
• APIs to create lots of apps that can lead to lots of customers: Apps are going to be a crucial channel in the next 10 years. There will be trillions of apps in the next decade vs.a billion web browsers in the last.

Then point the CTO to the post by Google engineer and Amazon alumnus Steve Yegge, that points out that APIs are so important to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos that he threatened to fire anyone who didn’t expose their assets through APIs.

APIs from Twitter, Amazon, Google, and Facebook have been used to create thousands of applications. These victories are being followed by APIs from AT&T, Sears, E*Trade, Alcatel-Lucent, Accuweather, and hundreds of other companies. Point the CEO to the research from John Musser, founder of ProgrammableWeb.com, a site that tracks the growth of APIs.

At this point if your CEO isn’t interested, then there’s not much you can do.

However, the next question your CEO will likely have is, “What is an API?”

Drawing this simple graphic is a good way to start:

API Value Chain

Explain that APIs are a simple way to provide access to some type of business assets. The business asset can be information itself, information about a product or service, or direct access to the product or service.

Point out that to make an API successful, everyone in the value chain must benefit. Make sure you convey you are not suggesting that if you build an API, the world will come rushing to use it.

The value chain takes many forms. The organization that owns the business asset may or may not be the same as the organization that builds the APIs. Different people or organizations may build, distribute, and market the applications. At the end of the chain are end users who gets the benefit of the business asset. Often, many APIs are used to create a new experience for end users.

Finding your API Value Proposition

If you are getting anywhere with your conversation, your CEO will likely get impatient with the technology and want to know the payoff for your company. He or she may say, “Great, APIs are a big deal, but what does that have to do with us?”

Here’s where you need to come armed with some sort of experiment that you want to get support for. One of the best ways to start is with an internal use of APIs. A key point of our book, one tirelessly championed by Daniel Jacobson, is that internal use of APIs is going to have the largest impact for most businesses. Remember, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos was going to fire people if they didn’t create internal APIs.

So, what are the business assets? Usually information that would benefit the company if more people had it in their hands. Look at the backlog of requests to IT. Is there an API that could take several items off the list? Have this in mind.

It is much better to build skills internally and master the design, development, testing, and operational processes before putting an API in public. That said, with careful planning and a clear value proposition, it is possible to have your first API be a public one, especially if you are following a well-established method of using APIs.

If you do start with an external public API, make sure you have a long testing cycle and flesh out all business and legal concerns before launching. I recently talked about API design and development with Byron Sebastion of Heroku, the Ruby platform for development that was purchased by Salesforce.com in 2010. He said that all of their APIs are first used extensively internally before going through a long public beta test. “When you launch an API, you want to make sure you are confident it is right, because people will rely on it,” Sebastian said.

At this point, I hope you are successful, because then you will need to answer questions about business models, design, engineering, operations, and marketing, all of which are covered in our book.

This article covers one way to go about educating a CEO about APIs. If you have other approaches, please send them along.

Also, we are going to be expanding the book several times this year. If you have a good example of how APIs have been successful for your organization, please reach out to me.

Dan Woods is CTO and editor of CITO Research, a firm focused on advancing the craft of technology leadership. He consults for many of the companies he writes about. For more stories about how CIOs and CTOs can grow visit CITOResearch.com.

This article originally posted by Scott Fulton on ReadWriteWeb on February 3, 2012 as Part II in a series. Part I can be found here.

What we today call the “mobile app” could, in a very short period of time, become known as the portable app, or just the “app.” It tends to use such a simple and straightforward model of interaction that people are starting to prefer using their smartphones for certain tasks, even when their PCs are right in front of them. By this time next year, portable apps originally designed for use on smartphones and tablets may be running on laptops.

The extent to which this changes everything is a topic that no one, not even ReadWriteWeb, has fully fathomed. The Web as we have come to know it will be affected significantly. What users have come to know as Web sites will be willingly and eagerly substituted with Web apps. In Part 2 of our interview with the co-author of APIs: A Strategy Guide, Netflix lead API engineer Daniel Jacobson tells us the one huge difference between an app and a site involves the extent to which they rely on an API. It is part of every app’s DNA.

The First, Painful Steps Toward Multi-Platform

In 2002, as you learned from part 1 of our RWW interview last week, when Jacobson was with NPR, he helped make a critical decision about its information infrastructure, the implications of which his team had not foreseen: “Literally the first thing that we did,” he tells RWW, “is, we built the API and we put the Web site on top of it. So the Web site runs off the API. It’s a little bit of a different interaction model; it doesn’t have to go through the authentication and whatever else, in the same way that external apps do.”

That API later gave NPR the freedom to build apps that run outside the browser, and that use that same API in different ways. So when mobile apps were invented, NPR was among the first publishers to be ready for them. When Netflix saw it needed an architecture that enabled it to reach all its users without it being dependent upon the usage model for any one device, including the Web browser, it hired Jacobson to build it.

A 2005 Netflix demo at a Microsoft convention featured one of that company’s program managers at the time, Darryn Dieken, showing then-President Jim Allchin the prospects of using one underlying technology as the foundation for developing a unified product line across different devices. The technology at the time was code-named “Avalon,” and evolved into what we now call Silverlight.

After showing how a Netflix product selector ran outside the browser but through the Web, in a way people had never seen before at that time, Dieken showed essentially the same selector running inside Windows Vista on a tablet PC. From there, he proceeded to show where else folks would eventually find Netflix.

The demo took the audience inside Windows Media Center, which had just been released for Windows XP and was being vastly updated for Vista. The Media Center plug-in used many of the same presentation techniques and concepts as the stand-alone version, demonstrating the benefits of code reuse.

But when the demo turned its attention to Netflix on a Windows Mobile phone, it became painfully obvious that the benefits of client-side code reuse could only go so far. Yes, there was communication taking place between all these different clients and the server. But the way these interactions were happening were based on leveraging Web site-oriented, forms-based submissions that at one level could be described as an API, but failed to be uniform – one API for many platforms.

The goal of any modern API, Dan Jacobson emphasizes, is “to treat any presentation layer the same. So if you have multiple Web sites, like NPR does (they have NPR Music as well as NPR.org), both of those sites run off of the same interaction model through the API. They’re just presentation layers, the same way as mobile app or Google TV or [NPR] Infinite Radio. Users are going to consume new material in any way that they want to, wherever, whenever; and your goal as publisher is to make sure that you have a presentation layer that serves them wherever that is. And in doing so, the easiest way, the most effective way to date is to leverage APIs, and invest a little bit on having the right talent surrounding it.”

“Publish Everywhere” Doesn’t Have to Be Homogenous

Because presentation layers are so different from one another, he goes on, a business can and should nurture teams of developers with the exclusive skillsets that each of those layers needs – for example, Objective-C developers for iPhone apps. There’s no reason why certain teams can’t specialize. Having a single API that addresses each layer in a standard way, he says, provides all your teams with the flexibility they require to take advantage of the platforms on which they’re focused.

This allowance for specialization tends to work itself away from the “one Web” way of thinking, the belief that everything will inevitably merge into HTML5. In professing that API design should not be centered around any one single mode of presentation, lest it eventually become obsolete (among other reasons), Jacobson advises that API designers focus on finding ways to symbolize and encode business interactions, the things that businesses do, not the things that Web sites do. Your goal is not to make the browser more efficient or the user experience more immersive. Leave that to the UX designers. As the API engineer, your goal is to enable business.

“That kind of thinking is fundamentally different than, ‘How do I want to structure my content? Do I need to think about what resources can be broken up in which ways and made available in different ways?’” says Jacobson. “For NPR, for example, there are stories, there are assets, different kinds of things in that system. For Netflix, there are users, catalog items. How do you want to structure that material, both in terms of the resource level as well as items underneath it? What are the rights management concerns that go into this, legal constraints internally about what can be published? For Netflix, what can I show users in Latin America that I can’t show to people in Canada? For NPR, it’s, I’m publishing AP photos; whom can’t I present that to, and whom can I? Those kinds of things are really business-oriented decisions that you can’t just flip a switch and say, ‘Make it happen.’ You need to be very thoughtful about what you’re exposing and to whom, and how you’re going to do it so you can get the maximum effectiveness out of it.”

It is this concept which may outmode, or render obsolete, the traditional notion of the Web site, the notion that something that’s created once and published everywhere (COPE) must always be the same thing. Done properly, Jacobson says, it can and should be integrated with the uniqueness of each device.

“When Web APIs started out, they tended to be more about publishing on all kinds of different platforms. Now I think it’s very much about aggregation, and merging others’ API experiences,” says the Netflix engineer. “One of the interesting things with Netflix, for example: We have branded apps on a wide range of platforms, and if you look at something like AppleTV or Roku or Xbox, or any of these other devices, we’re not the only ones there. There is an aggregation of services where Netflix creates an experience on that platform. We actually integrate with their systems, we’re creating an experience on that site, and then people can access our experience in the way they expect it to be presented.”

This article originally posted by Scott Fulton on ReadWriteWeb on January 28, 2012

The first place I had ever seen an API actually at work was as part of an operating system. It was a strange OS at that, a permutation of CP/M that used a graphical front end called GEM, which would later be ported to the Atari ST. The definition was explained to me like this: An “interface,” as everyone knows, is a specification for how electrical components interconnect. Well, now it’s possible for an application program – the part that does what users need – to interconnect with the operating system, which does what the computer needs. This way the operating functions don’t have to be built into every program, they can just be handed off to the OS and the connection will look seamless. The principle was called a layer of abstraction. It was 1984, and it was the first time I’d heard the term.

It would be wrong to call the concept “revolutionary,” unless you measure time in units of eons. Nearly three decades after its introduction, only recently have businesses come to realize how widely this architectural principle could be applied. No longer do complex processes have to be bound to precise, policy-intrinsic procedures. If teams can work independently, and computer resources devised to suit each team individually, then all that needs to be specified is the exchange of information between them.

So it is that a software designer ends up becoming one of the public faces of the ideal of API architecture as a business tool. Daniel Jacobson is the lead API engineer for Netflix – arguably the largest single consumer of bandwidth on the entire Internet. His O’Reilly book, APIs: A Strategy Guide, co-authored with Apigee CTO Greg Brail and research editor Dan Wood, deals with the implementation of APIs not so much for software’s own exclusive purposes, but moreover as a means of realigning and renovating business’ resources overall.

“APIs should not be geeky ‘science projects,’” reads the first paragraph of Chapter 4. “They are critical business tools. Successful APIs need clear objectives that relate directly to business objectives and track closely to key performance indicators for the business at large.”

More open on the inside

We’ve written here in ReadWriteWeb in the past about the value of APIs in providing transparency and accessibility to businesses, mainly through enabling them to develop mobile apps that connect more directly to their customers. Jacobson has a different perspective, which derives from his experience with Netflix, and earlier as the creator of the API for NPR. It was in 2002 that Jacobson and his NPR team made discoveries that he describes as part logic, part luck.

“At that time, a lot of publishers would be buying these CMSes, off-the-shelf products like Interwoven or Vignette,” Jacobson relates to RWW. “And the flexibility, and the opportunity for thinking in these [new] kinds of ways, was somewhat limited.”

Subsisting sometimes from month to month on public and government funding, NPR didn’t have the budget to go big and invest in a colossal, support-intensive CMS like Vignette – an investment which, at that time, often cost bigger businesses tens if not hundreds of thousands per year, after including maintenance costs. Faced with no other obvious option, NPR was forced to go it alone, building its own CMS. And in recognizing the need to maximize its efficiency, Jacobson and his colleagues decided that their system had to be designed from the beginning to be flexible enough to publish to any platform, including those that had not yet been created.

So NPR adopted a design philosophy called COPE: Create Once, Publish Everywhere.

“That was the really fortunate decision that we made… We didn’t think about iPhones and tablets, and things like that, in 2002. But we were thinking that we could imagine a case somewhere down the road where the Web site would need to change again, or we’re going to do another redesign… It was really important for us to have this COPE model, so we can actually capture all the metadata that’s important to us in a very modularized way so that, regardless of what the display is going to look like, we can publish to it very easily. So conceptually, we separated the idea of capturing the data from presenting the data.”

It was NPR’s first abstraction layer. But it was not yet an API, mainly because the CMS and the database were still tightly bound. To this day, businesses that invested in content management systems around the year 2000 are wrestling with the headaches of data portability, because their CMS is too tightly bound to its database, and the database has become a rusty, misbehaving vault.

The interface as publishing

It was 2007. While NPR had a system that could publish anywhere, the create-once part was giving it problems. The creation was becoming a frightful mess.

“It was that moment in 2007, I think, when we said, we’ll need another abstraction layer to separate out the direct access from the presentation layer to the database, even though we had conceptualized them as being different, that binding to the database was still there. That’s when we created this new abstraction layer of the API, and shortly after that, [we realized] we could open this thing up quickly.”

The process of integrating the abstraction layer was entirely internal, and its goals were focused on how NPR could retool itself. But in making that change, the organization realized it could effectively publish the benefits of that abstraction in a way that was entirely in keeping with the goals of its COPE methodology. Dan Jacobson tells us that, in this phase of the project, he incorporated another important ethic, this time straight from the world of broadcasting: Know your audience. More specifically, build each component of the system in tune with the needs of its consumer.

Jacobson’s API project enabled NPR to publish stories and excerpts through its own cross-platform app, entitled “Infinite Radio.”

Jacobson’s book suggests that more businesses either nurture or hire someone who can serve as the technologist for their company, and make it this person’s job to know the audience – to understand how data is being consumed and who is doing the consuming. “And then understand what abstraction layer, like an API, needs to be put in place,” he explains, “to basically be the glue between the capturing of the data and the presentation to its users.”

One term Jacobson often borrows from the software development world and applies to the business world is context. He uses it to mean the breadth of a person’s influence in the company, and there are reasons that influence may be limited. But only through understanding the different contexts of business units, he feels, can a developer build an API that enables them to interoperate.

“Publishers are thinking about how can they create an organization that will put them in a position for this kind of rapid growth,” Dan Jacobson continues. “At Netflix now, we have several hundred devices running off our API. Many publishers of various kinds would love to have that kind of distribution. You need your technologists in a position to have the context and the trust of the superiors, and basically everybody on board with making smart decisions and allowing them to execute. The larger the company sometimes, the more bureaucracy there is, and the more they need to have these discussions. They’re basically, potentially, shackling their people… Here, you’re putting them in a position to make decisions for you.”

Fate has an interesting way of making itself appear coincidental. Had NPR not been so constrained by its own budget limitations, it might never have hired the team that designed their CMS and that implemented COPE in the first place. And it might still be bound by the same tight, complex information architecture that binds so many bigger commercial enterprises to this day.

“I think it’s the confluence of a range of things – the financial restrictions, having good people, good context, good control of the situation, and making smart decisions – and a little bit of luck,” says Jacobson. “We could have made some smart decisions at the time that weren’t quite as lucky down the road. We were very fortunate.”

This presentation was from the App Dev Conference in Santa Clara, CA on October, 27, 2011.

API programs, typically thought of as a public program to see what public developer communities can build with a company’s data, are becoming more and more critical to the success of mobile and device strategies. This presentation takes a look at Netflix’s and NPR’s strategies that lead to tremendous growth and discusses how Netflix plans to take this internal API strategy to the next level.

This is my presentation from the Business of APIs Conference in SF, held by Mashery (http://www.apiconference.com). This talk talks briefly about the history of the Netflix API, then goes into three main categories of scaling:

• 1. Using the cloud to scale in size and internationally
• 2. Using Webkit to scale application development in parallel to the flexibility afforded by the API
• 3. Redesigning the API to improve performance and to downscale the infrastructure as the system scales

When viewing these slides, please note that they are almost entirely image-based, so I have added notes for each slide to detail the talking points.