TIBCO Now Day 3—The Nitty Gritty of Implementing an API Program

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The last day of TIBCO NOW showed no signs of slowing down on the great content designed to help you make the most of your investment in the cloud and APIs. Where the last couple of days were full of product announcements and the business side of APIs, today was all about execution.

Leon Stigter kicked off the day with a session on implementing an API architecture. As innovation moves to the cloud, he explained, APIs fall more into focus, especially as the connective tissue of the “SMAC” stack: Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud. As the lines between AI creation and API management blur, the need for an integration layer—one that lives where the APIs live, in the cloud—becomes more vital.

Mashery Enterprise is designed to address this need. It allows for a zero-code approach to both creating and managing APIs by allowing users to access both integration and management capabilities directly in the browser. This allows the lines of business, who are increasingly taking ownership of their digital tools and products, to have better control of their investments without relying on the IT organization. And because Mashery Enterprise is built on TIBCO’s extensive leadership in the integration space, enterprise-level reliability and performance are baked right into its DNA.

Carvoyant CEO Bret Tobey demonstrated the value of an “API first” approach to building a business, walking us through the steps they took to success. Carvoyant provides automotive data taken directly from the On Board Diagnostics system from any car made after 1996, and makes it accessible through a standardized API to car manufacturers, maintenance professionals, automotive app developers, and anyone else who can use this information to add value to their business.

I also presented my point of view on the cutting edge of API management in the cloud: how the cloud and APIs have created opportunities for new and lucrative business models and some of the trends that will expand these opportunities in the coming months and years, including microservice architectures, the Internet of Things and what I call “Problem Solving as a Service”—smaller services that are ancillary to your primary products and services that none the less can provide value to customers and revenue to your top line. But the real cutting edge of the cloud is where your customers engage with your services and products on their own terms. The combination of cloud-based infrastructures made accessible through well designed, well-managed APIs creates a platform for your business that allows you to rapidly adapt to the expectations of your customers as their needs change.

TIBCO Senior Solutions Architect Dan Tracy brought this point home with his nuts and bolts perspective on API management. In this strongly technical presentation, Tracy demonstrated the best practices and approaches to leveraging TIBCO Mashery to scale, secure, and support your API program with industry-leading traffic management, key management, developer support and more. It was a concrete demonstration of Mashery’s capabilities that encouraged attendees to hit the ground running in building out their API programs.

What an incredible week! TIBCO NOW was a fantastic opportunity to meet with new people, reconnect with old friends, and get a glimpse into the future of the digital space from an industry leader perspective. The conference may be over for this year, but keep an eye on this space for even more details on what’s to come and how to best leverage these technologies to grow your business and your career.

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