It is clear that the API Economy is kicking into gear in a big way. Last week, Intel announced its acquisition of Mashery, this week, CA Technologies announced its acquisition of Layer7 , MuleSoft announced its acquisition of ProgrammableWeb and 3Scale closed a round of funding for 4.2M.

Money is flooding into the API Economy as the importance of APIs only heightens. Expect this trend to continue.

The upside of this flurry of activity is the focus being given to the API Economy.

But here is my assessment.

CA’s acquisition of Layer7 doesn’t necessarily bode well for Layer7 or its customers. CA as a large vendor will probably take longer than Layer 7 would do independently for defining and delivering on the roadmap, but they might put far more power behind such roadmap and its execution. Layer7 needs an upgrade and needs to move to the cloud. CA has a clear Cloud strategy it executes on – look at IAM and Service Management where a large portion of the products is available as cloud service; there is a strong potential for CA putting far more pressure behind the required move of Layer 7 to the cloud. Let’s see what happens there.

MuleSoft’s acquisition of ProgammableWeb is a little weird. John Musser is an independent well-spoken representative of the API Economy. MuleSoft has an agenda with its own platform. Does MuleSoft let Musser continue to be an independent spokesperson? Where does this lead to? All answers unknown.

3Scale gets a round of funding for 4.2M. It plans to add more extensions to the product and grow its international distribution with the funds.

Lots of activity here. Curious to see what happens next.

However, one thing is clear: The API Economy is going mainstream.

Let there be no confusion. Intel is a hardware company. It makes microchips. This is its core business. History shows that companies do best when they stick to their roots. There are exceptions.

At the same time, Intel has always dabbled in software at some level. Mostly in products that support the chip architecture. Compilers, development tools and debuggers.

From time to time, however, Intel ventures into the software business with more serious intentions.

Back in 1991, Intel acquired LAN Systems in attempt to get more serious into the LAN utility business. This direction was later abandoned and Intel went back to its knitting as a chip vendor.

Recently, Intel has started again to be serious about being in the software business. Its most serious foray was with the purchase of McAfee in 2010 to the tune of some 7.6 billion. A pretty serious commitment.

We wrote recently about Intel’s intent to be a serious player in the Identity Management business with its composite platform Expressway API management.

With that approach, Intel was clear that it had an “investment” in Mashery that would remain an arm’s length relationship best supporting the customer and allowing maximum flexibility for Mashery. In general, I like this approach better than an acquisition. Acquisitions by big companies of little companies are don’t always turn out for the best for anyone.

Since then, it is clear that Intel management has shifted its view and thinks that outright ownership of Mashery is a better plan.

While we agree that outright ownership can mean more control and management of direction, it can also mean the marginalization of and independent group that could possibly act more dynamically on its own.

It is still too early to tell exactly how this will turn out for Intel and its customers, it will be important to watch and see how the organization is integrated into the company.

At KuppingerCole we use Office365 extensively to manage our documents and keep track of document development and distribution.

On April 9, 2013, Microsoft released a normal sized Tuesday update to Windows and Office products. The only thing is, this time the update completely broke the functionality of Office 365 and Office 2013. Trying to open a document stored in SharePoint would result in a recursive dialogue box asking for you to authenticate to the SharePoint server. Same thing would happen when trying to upload a document. Excel and PowerPoint documents had the same problem.

Going to the Office365 forum resulted in a bevy of customers complaining about the problem. A Microsoft tech support person was offering possible solutions, all of which were just time wasters and solved nothing.

“First, please run desktop setup by following Set up your desktop for Office 365
If the issue persists, please remove saved login credentials from the Windows credential manager and then sign into the MS account.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-IN/windows7/Store-passwords-certificates-and-other-credentials-for-automatic-logon”

Finally, two days later a customer posted a solution.

“KB2768349 is definitely the culprit. I uninstalled this on Windows RT and login worked again across all Office 2013 RT apps. Reinstalling broke it. Uninstalling again fixed it.
Replicated on my Windows 8 desktop with Office 2013.
For the time being I have hidden KB2768349 from Windows Update until this is fixed.”

As soon as I deleted the KB2768349 update the problem went away. I also learned what “hiding” an update entails.

For those of you dying to know, here is how you fix this thing.

control panel>windows update>view update history>installed updates

Scroll down thru the Office 2013 updates until you find KB2768349. Select and then uninstall.

Of course once you uninstall an update, it’s going to show back up again and try to update. The way you prevent this is to “hide” the update so it doesn’t keep showing up. To hide and update, you open Windows Update and right mouse the update you want to hide and select “hide update.” There you go.

So for two days the normal operation of Office365 was frustratingly broken. Now this was not just for me and my colleagues, but for everyone on the planet that used Office365 and installed these updates. At the same time, the fix applies to everyone on the planet using Office365 as well. In other words, critical apps in the cloud that go bad, go bad hard. They also heal big. Part of the deal.

I was surprised that I was the only one tweeting and complaining about it. I didn’t see one article or public view on this major screw up. The only place I saw any complaining was on the Office365 forum. So glad that was happening.

cross posted with KuppingerCole.

When I pay my electric bill I usually just call the power company and give them my credit card. This month I decided that I should go set up auto payments on the web site and be done with it. So I opened the power company web site and attempted to login. Clearly the site recognized me, the login name I usually use was being recognized, but I just could not remember my password. I tried all of the normal passwords I use and none of them were working.

So I attempted to retrieve my password, it gave me an option of having the password reset sent to my email address or answering secret questions. I opted to have it sent to my email address. I waited. Nothing showed up in my email box. I looked in the spam folder, still nothing. I went back to the web site and this time I opted for being asked the secret question…..”What is your favorite color”. Oh man, I don’t know. Depends on my mood and what day it is. I don’t remember what I put in there for my favorite color. Ok. Let’s try “Blue.” Good, that worked. Wow. I am in. Hey. This isn’t my account? WTF?

Now I know there are two other Craig Burton’s living in Utah. Apparently I have just accessed the electricity billing account of one of them by guessing both the user name and secret question. And the secret question was “blue?”

Off the top of my head I would say the Electric Company has a severe security leak in it.

Of course I didn’t do anything to this account. I could see that his email address was just sent another request to change the name and password. I hope he did that.

This was an ugly incident that could have been much uglier if I was malicious.

Here is my point, a uniform cloud-based Identity management system could be used to prevent this kind of thing. As it stands, every single web site has its own set of code used to prevent inappropriate access. A scenario bound to create the blatant hole I ran into.

Of course the other side of the coin is that if the cloud-based identity management system had a hole in it, everybody would have the hole. Then again, the fix would fix everybody. Trade-offs but I still think the cloud-based Identity Management as a Service is where we are headed in the future.

Securing BYOD

With the rapidly emerging cloud-mobile-social Troika coupled with the API Economy, there are so many questions about how to design systems that can allow application access to internal information and resources via APIs that will not compromise the integrity of enterprise assets. And on the other hand, how do we prevent inappropriate personal information from propagating inappropriately as personal data stores and information is processed and accessed? Indeed, I have read so many articles lately that predict utter catastrophe from the inevitable smart phone and tablet application rush that leverages the burgeoning API economy.

In recent posts, I have posited that one approach to solving the problem is by using an IdMaaS design for authentication and authorization.

Another proposed approach—that keeps coming up—is a system construct that is referred to as the “Façade Proxy.”

A place to start to understand the nature of Facades is in an article by Bruno Pedro entitled “Using Facades to Decouple API Integrations.”

In this article Bruno explains:

A Façade is an object that provides simple access to complex – or external – functionality. It might be used to group together several methods into a single one, to abstract a very complex method into several simple calls or, more generically, to decouple two pieces of code where there’s a strong dependency of one over the other.

What happens when you develop API calls inside your code and, suddenly, the API is upgraded and some of its methods or parameters change? You’ll have to change your application code to handle those changes. Also, by changing your internal application code, you might have to change the way some of your objects behave. It is easy to overlook every instance and can require you to double-check multiple lines of code.
There’s a better way to keep API calls up-to-date. By writing a Façade with the single responsibility of interacting with the external Web service, you can defend your code from external changes. Now, whenever the API changes, all you have to do is update your Façade. Your internal application code will remain untouched.

To shed even more light on how a Façade Proxy is designed and can be used to address yet another problem is blog post from Kin Lane. Kin is an API Evangelist extraordinaire and I learn a lot from him in his writings. Kin recently wrote in a blog post entitled “An API that Scrubs Personally Identifiable Information from Other APIs”:

I had a conversation with one UC Berkeley analyst about a problem that isn’t just unique to a university, but they are working on an innovative solution for.

The problem:

UCB Developers are creating Web Services that provide access to sensitive data (e.g. grades, transcripts, current enrollments) but only trusted applications are typically allowed to access these Web Services to prevent misuse of the sensitive data. Expanding access to these services, while preserving the confidentiality of the data, could provide student and third party developers with opportunities to create new applications that provide UCB students with enhanced services.

The solution:

Wrapping untrusted applications in a “Proxied Façade Service” framework that passes anonymous tickets through the “untrusted” application to underlying services that can independently extract the necessary personal information provides a secure way of allowing an application to retrieve a Web User’s Business data (e.g. their current course enrollments) WITHOUT exposing any identifying information about the user to the untrusted application.

I find their problem and solution fascinating, I also think it is something that could have huge potential. When data leaves any school, healthcare provider, financial services or government office, the presence of sensitive data is always a concern. More data will be leaving these trusted systems, for use in not just apps, but also for analysis and visualizations, and the need to scrub personally identifiable information will only grow.

Finally, Intel recently announced its Expressway API Manger product suite. EAM is a new category of service that Intel is calling a “Composite API Platform.” It is referred as such as the platform is a composite of a premise-based gateway that allows organizations to create and secure APIs that can be externalized for secure access through a cloud-based API management service from Mashery designed to help organizations expose, monetize and manage APIs to developers. In its design, Intel has created a RESTful Façade API that exposes APIs to developers for internal information and resources of an organization. It is very similar to the design approach outlined by Kin. This approach looks to be an elegant use of the Façade pattern to efficiently manage authorization and authentication of mobile apps to information that needs to remain secure.

Figure 2–EAM Application Life Cycle Source: Intel

I am learning a lot about the possible API designs—like the Façade Proxy—that can be useful constructs for organizations to successfully participate in the API economy and not give up the farm.

Introduction

Making an API is hard. It is also a tough question. A small company out of England has figured out how to let anyone make an API with just:

1. Dropbox
2. A Spreadsheet
3. A Datownia SaaS account

Datownia

One of the activities I practice to keep up with what is happening in the world of APIs is to subscribe to the ProgrammableWeb’s newsletter. Every week the newsletter contains the latest APIs that have been added to the rapidly increasing list. While I seldom can get through the whole list, I inevitably find one or two new APIs that are really interesting.

Recently I ran into one that has an incredibly simple and effective method of creating an API out of a spreadsheet.

The Company is Datownia.com

I now have an API with a developer portal that is driven by data in a spread sheet.

I can distribute developer keys to any developer I choose and then that developer can access the data and integrate it into any app.

Further, any change I make to the spreadsheet get versioned and propagated to the API with just a click. To propagate the data, all I do is modify the spreadsheet and drop it into the linked DropBox folder.

Here is what my spreadsheet looks like.

Here is what the JSON look like when you make a restful call to the API location created for me by Datownia.

So simple.

I have been talking a lot about companies that manage already existing APIs. But what about organizations that need to create APIs?

A few weeks ago, I received an email from the CEO of Datownia wanting to give me a small gift to chat with him about what I was doing with their technology.

Of course as an analyst I can’t accept any gifts, but I had a great conversation with William Lovegrove about the technology and where the idea came from.

From one-offs to a SaaS

Basically William’s little consulting firm was busy building and evangelizing APIs to organizations. When a company was confronted with making an API, often progress would screech to halt or at least be diverted while things were sorted out. Often IT departments simply could not deal with making an API for anything. Other times they would be engaged into creating a one-time API for a company.

Complicated, expensive and not very efficient.

Datownia then came up with the idea of building a service in the cloud that automates the process of building and API.

I think this is brilliant.

If you need ana API, or just want to play with a prototype, you should take a look at how simple this is.

Thanks William Lovegrove and crew.

Intro

Starting at the EIC 2012 I have been talking and presenting a lot about The API Economy. The API Economy has become a strategic topic for organizations. As one can expect with a hot topic, there are many opinions and views on the matter. Therefore there a many comments, blog posts and articles written about The API Economy.

Needless to say it is tough to keep track of everything being said or to track any given thread. I should start off by saying the questions asked by this blog post are appropriate and need to be answered.

Summary of the Oasis Cloud Symposium last week in Washington DC.

Blog post on KuppingerCole site for NSTIC announcement.