Published on the 10/02/2015 | Written by Beverley Head

The APIDays conference has been organised by Sixtree which provides IT services to the likes of Toyota, Telstra, Victoria Police and Deakin University. It builds solutions that “cross boundaries”, be they enterprise boundaries or application boundaries, by using or developing application programming interfaces (APIs) as effective bridges.
Saul Caganoff, chief technology officer of Sixtree, explained that five years ago the firm noted a major trend with the democratisation of integration. “Smaller companies were needing this for integration with cloud-based services such as (subscription software) Zuora and (accounting platform) Xero,” he said.

While the API movement is gathering steam internationally Caganoff said it is not yet as well understood over here, and the conference is intended “to bring practitioners together to spread the word about APIs at a vendor neutral conference”.

Although the first conference is in Sydney, Caganoff said a significant number of New Zealand practitioners and speakers were also signed up for the inaugural event, which he hopes will repeat annually with a series of smaller workshops organised through the year “to keep the momentum going”.

In terms of the value of an API-driven approach to integration, Caganoff said: “At a very obvious level the API represents the interface to the outside world. It takes the www model and exposes that in a format that can be consumed by devices so that you can have a web for devices as well as people,” adding that an API-led approach resonated particularly for organisations deploying ‘internet of things’ or cloud solutions.

“But there is a more fundamental shift happening in terms of the way we build and consume applications internally. When you build or buy a big ERP you spend a lot of time customising it or integrating it.

“What APIs do is focus more on delivering useful functionality, this delivers more agility in what we call the ‘composable enterprise’, bringing together say CRM from Salesforce, billing from Zuora and accounting from Xero or MYOB so that you are consuming services not applications.”