1. Who Cares About APIs?
Nordic APIs, Copenhagen 2014
Anne-Sofie Nielsen
VP, Product Development
Kapow Software

2. Who am I
• M.Sc. Software Engineering from DTU
• VP, Product Development at Kapow
Software
• Developed Kapow’s integration with
LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce
and Google’s APIs
• Worked on browser-based automation
for years
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3. Disclaimer
• Kapow Software makes a living wrapping API-less web
applications in “Synthetic APIs”
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REST/Java/.Net
Web application
Robot
Web application photo credit: Daniela Meleo

4. So, how does that work?
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Workflow
Browser (or
XML / JSON /
PDF / Excel)

5. Why this talk?
• ProgrammableWeb.com: 11,204 APIs
• WorldWideWebSize.com: 1.88 billion web sites
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6. Why this talk?
• ProgrammableWeb.com: 11,204 APIs
• WorldWideWebSize.com: 1.88 billion web sites
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Photos: JMacPherson and David Sward

7. Now, what is the ambition here?
• ProgrammableWeb.com: 11,204 APIs
• WorldWideWebSize.com: 1.88 billion web sites
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Photo: Søren Juhl

8. API First Strategy
• It only something for the young and hip?
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Evan and Fiona from API-First.com.
Very hip.

9. API First Strategy
Advantages
• Easier to offer multiple front-ends
(web, mobile etc.)
• Clear division of responsibility
– Clear interface between the
work done by your backend
and front-end team
– Easier to scale your
application
Disadvantages
• Up-front cost
• Hard to generalize based on a
single example
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10. API First Strategy
• Can not creating an API for your application be seen as
a form of technical debt?
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11. It’s about the $$$
• It’s not always the entity who builds the application that
has anything to gain from an API
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I Need
APIs
Adapted from photo by Gemma Vittoria

12. It’s about the $$$ - example
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Partner portal
Partner portal
Partner portal
Internal
scheduling
application
Who has an
incentive to build
these APIs?

13. It’s about the $$$ - example
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Partner portal
Partner portal
Partner portal
Internal
scheduling
application KAPOW!

14. It’s about the $$$ - example
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Partner portal
Partner portal
Partner portal
Internal
scheduling
application

15. Click A Taxi – Disrupting the Taxi Business with
Innovative Consumer Apps
15
Challenge
Rapidly integrate with a
growing network of Taxi
companies and partners with
no reliance on API access
Solution
High volume integrations
across partner systems: taxi
companies, restaurants,
hotels, flight bookings
50 countries, 5000 cities,
100,000 bookings per
month, expanded globally in
18 months
“Without Kapow technology, we couldn’t have expanded into this
many cities so fast. Our average partner integration now takes less
than two days to complete.”
— Søren Halskov Nissen, CEO, Click A Taxi

16. OK, so why did I sit through that commercial?
• Because it illustrates some of the advantages you can
gain in a programmable world
– “Let’s put humans to work where we need human minds. And
let’s automate the rest.” – Jessica Deutch, Digital River
• And, unless you build synthetic APIs on top of the front
end, that generally requires APIs to be present
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17. Who is going to insist on APIs?
• Enterprises demanding cloud, cloud, cloud
– “Over the next two years, there will be an explosive growth in
the number of enterprise cloud computing projects, according to
a study into cloud computing trends by TheInfoPro”,
computerweekly.com
• Can we get them as excited about APIs?
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18. So why demand APIs, anyway?
• APIs lend themselves very well to automation
– Paves the way for future savings through automation of manual
processes
• Your valuable data doesn’t get stuck in some vendor’s
proprietary systems
– You can move it to other systems, or consolidate many data
sources into a single view
• APIs should be on IT’s checklist right up there with
security and scalability
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19. But just before we get too excited about APIs,
let me be a little old and grumpy
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• APIs are not very standardized
• Not all APIs are user friendly or well documented
– There can be a real learning curve to an API
• Public APIs can get closed down or restricted

20. Questions / Discussion
• Have you experienced the discrepancy between those
who need an API and those with the power to create it?
• Why are we not more aggressively demanding APIs
from our software tool vendors?
• What is stopping us from creating APIs up front?
• What would you automate or consolidate if the lack of
APIs weren’t an issue?
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21. Thank you
Anne-Sofie Nielsen, Kapow Software
E-mail: anielsen@kapowsoftware.com
Twitter: @femalenerd
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/femalenerd
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