APIs are at now the core of everything we do in our work and personal lives. They are the building blocks of the “software-defined transformation”, powering everything from enterprise systems like ERP and CRM, to financial services from Visa and MasterCard, to consumer services like ride-sharing behemoth Uber, to Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as Nest and industrial sensors. In fact many would even argue that the need for APIs has expanded from a technical to a business priority.
Against this backdrop, as a company that helps enterprises build APIs, I was intrigued when I came across an interesting article that questioned whether APIs would eventually kill enterprise middleware.
While I think the author raises valid points on why traditional middleware causes problems for developers, I think it is premature to claim that APIs will be the death of middleware in the near future. First of all, there are way too many (less visible and apparent) legacy and custom systems buried across many corporations’ IT landscapes that are not easy to API-enable. Furthermore, while exposing APIs certainly makes systems more “integration-friendly”, it doesn’t mean that they will start integrating with each other automatically.
For example, your CRM system may have REST APIs and your Trouble Ticket system may have REST APIs. If you want your CRM system to automatically get updates from the Trouble Ticket system when something changes, you still have to tell those systems how to use their respective APIs, what data elements to exchange, where you want to store the data, and how often the data should be updated. Specifying this type of integration business logic may still requires middleware to define, especially when the integration spans more than two systems.
Also, there are cases where you may want to create a “composite application” that displays data from multiple systems into a new application. You still have to author software logic that connects to the different systems, extracts the data, and potentially massages the format, to make it easy to build the composite app. This is where middleware, and a newer class of application infrastructure technology, called Backend-as-a-Service or Mobile Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS or MBaaS), like AnyPresence can help.
Furthermore, if IoT devices continue to proliferate at their current rate, we will need middleware more than ever, perhaps in a different form (like IFFT and Zapier), but some intermediary software needs to connect and retrieve data from devices, combine the data with other sources, and do interesting things with it, such as perform an action on another device.
I also believe that traditional middleware vendors have recognized this demand for APIs, and will evolve their offerings to help companies expose and manage APIs on top of their source IT systems. These vendors will either organically build this capability or acquire, as we have seen recently with the Mashery acquisition by long-time enterprise middleware company Tibco.
What do you think? Will APIs eventually kill off middleware? Send us your thoughts at info@anypresence.com. You can also try the AnyPresence backend service platform for free to experience how we help customers build APIs and composite apps that connect to different source systems: https://api.anypresence.com/trial