This past week, we sent our team to APIStrat Austin, which was an exciting three days of all things APIs, IoT and software development. One of the many highlights was the panel “ IoT, API Gateways, and Next Generation of APIs.” During the session, our VP of Product Management, Vivek Gupta discussed how IoT is driving the need to support developer ecosystems. With upwards of 50 billion devices making connections in a given day, Vivek pinpointed the most successful IoT solutions as those that create an ecosystem.
As such, he reviewed challenges and best practices for building a developer ecosystem around IoT. Challenges included: IoT solution complexity, and overall ecosystem adoption. Vivek shared a slide that showed a best practices architecture for IoT solutions and app innovation.
According to Vivek, APIs are the “must-have starting point", and careful attention should be given to human-Machine interactions (HMI), optimizing the API to a particular solution. With access to the developer community, APIs can be integrated in ways that push into a larger and larger IoT ecosystem.
At the end of his presentation, Vivek summarized:
- IoT will impact and potentially reinvent many industries and sectors
- There are challenges related to complex IoT solution requirements
- The value of IoT will be realized with underlying apps and APIs
- APIs are the must have starting point of the ecosystem – the last leg of the value chain is HMI
- Successful vendors will be able to leverage the ecosystem
You can download the slides from Vivek's presentation here.
Aside from the panel, we had great conversations with folks about use cases and specific problems they were trying to solve within their organizations. Many of them mirrored what our customers struggled with: building a RESTful layer on top of their legacy systems and data sources. We explained how that really was the genesis of our API development tool, JustAPIs. We recognized that companies needed a way to easily build that RESTification layer. We also explained how JustAPIs is the perfect tool for companies looking to expose their APIs to developers for hackathons or innovation days, as JustAPIs can be used with mock data to create APIs that mimic production APIs. You can learn more about how some of our customers, like Citi are using JustAPIs to do just that here.
We had a great time at API Strat and are looking forward to continuing the conversation on leveraging APIs as part of supporting IoT developer ecosystems! You can download JustAPIs for free to get started building APIs for your own IoT ecosystem here or drop us a line to see how we could help with your enterprise mobility and digital transformation efforts.